More notes on e-books

I do feel rather badly that my reading of physical books have been somewhat sidelined, as I have been investigating all the e-books available at the Toronto Public Library.  (I believe Robarts has a relatively smaller number of academic e-books but these aren't available to alumni borrowers, so it is irrelevant to me.)  I think the pendulum will swing back fairly soon.  I have 4 books out from the various libraries which may come due during the summer probably, and as the weather gets better out, I will want to sit outside and read.  (As I don't have an actual Kindle, only a Kindle emulator on my computer, the paper-versions will win out.)  I've also been meaning to read several comedies by Aristophanes, so I'll add that to the list.

But back to the e-books.  I'm quite surprised that the library has a largely complete set of NYRB Classics available, even relatively recent books like Grossman's Stalingrad, Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and von Rezzori's Abel and Cain.*  One that has been overlooked is Barbara Comyns's The Juniper Tree.  While not on the NYRB Classics imprint, they have Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but only an acceptable translation (Ginsburg).  Interestingly, they have a fairly weak translation of Mann's The Magic Mountain, but they have the "good" translation by James Wood of Buddenbrooks.  This was the version I was struggling to find in the used bookstores up here, and then it just happens to be available as an e-book, so I quickly added that to my library queue.

I'm finding that most books with lots of photographs and maps -- so history books and some social science tomes -- don't make the translation to e-book very well.  It's not impossible to do this properly,  but it does cost more and publishers pretty much everywhere are cutting corners as much as they can.  So that's a disappointment (and a general weakness of e-books), though it doesn't impact philosophy and more text-based non-fiction.

On the other hand, there is one book that positively shines through in this new format -- Cortazar's Hopscotch.  This is a book that can be read through straight or in a non-linear hyper-text format.  Now the reader can actually click along to follow to the next proper chapter.  So this will be quite a bit of fun to trace through.

Anyway no question there is far too much to read as always.  I may even pull together a reading list  comprised exclusively of e-books if I decide I can't keep track of what I am reading otherwise.


* I read the first part a bit over a year ago and have to admit I didn't care for it that much, but I've always wanted to read the last, (previously) untranslated part, Cain.  It turns out that they touched up the previous translation slightly, but it is largely the same as before.  I didn't like it enough to read it carefully a second time through, comparing the original to the revised translation.  That said, I did check major sections as they started or ended and found that this entire line was trimmed from the revised translation (which strikes me as a bit over-reaching, assuming that the line was actually in the German text).  This is the last page of The Death of My Brother Abel.  The excised line is in italics: Afterward, Carlotta told me that her ears had buzzed for hours.  It was as if you had expected a line of poetry and were given Mein Kampf to read instead, she said.

Summer Cancelled

We've had a smattering of advance cancellations impacting this summer, including the Toronto Fringe and the Driftwood Tour, which usually stops in Withrow Park for a couple of evenings.  Those were pretty hard to swallow, but I've just heard that Stratford is cancelling the entire season.  This is a fairly major blow, though not exactly unexpected.  And even if they had run a few plays, they probably wouldn't be running the bus over to Stratford.  One thing that is frustrating is that they are playing hardball with refunding the money (which runs into hundreds of dollars) saying that it will be a credit towards 2021.  I've had mixed feelings about other places doing this, but generally they were more open to asking how you wanted to deal with the funds (except for Canadian Stage).  I don't know if Stratford will more or less port this season over to next or what they plan on doing.  I was quite looking forward to The Rez Sisters, and I'd say that is one that they almost certainly will just reschedule for 2021.

The TSO just recently admitted that they will be cancelling all the May and June concerts, which really bites as there were a few very nice concerts, including I was planning on taking my son to see Beethoven's 5th Symphony for the first time.  Given the timeframe, they (the TSO) still thinks they will be able to salvage most of the 2020-21 season, but I don't see how that is possible between the seats far too close together and the fact that the average attendee must be about 70 (and they won't even be allowed out of the house).  Basically, until a vaccine is successfully tested, I don't see how any arts organization can actually afford to put on any shows to houses that are only 20% full due to social distancing.  We are basically looking at 2-3 years lost in the arts, and I simply don't see how most of these organizations can survive under those conditions.  I think the museums are a little bit better able to weather the storm, and they probably can find ways to spread out visitors in a way that would prevent them from completely closing down, once the restrictions start to lift ever so slowly.  That said, I'm not too hopeful about the Picasso Blue Period exhibit actually making it here in the late summer/early fall.

And on that cheery note, let's move on to summer concerts.  In this case, there were 2 or 3 concerts I was pretty interested in, though I had only actually booked tickets to see Squeeze and Hall & Oates.  Because these concerts aren't officially cancelled (though they will simply have to be), they aren't even beginning to talk about refunds.  In fact, one promoter had the nerve to add a new concert to the line-up at Budweiser Stage(!), when this clearly won't be going forward.  It's just a really hard thing to process with all this disappointing news.  I know a lot of artists are basically optimists (or they would be in a different profession), but I don't see any positives (other than these kind of janky Zoom sessions) for months and months and months.  I'll just leave it at that, since there is no point in trying to cheer myself up with false hope.

Productive Two Weeks

I know I am one of the relatively fortunate few who is able to work remotely with no major interruptions in terms of keeping projects on track.  In addition, my children are old enough that they can handle the on-line learning fairly well (if a bit reluctantly in one case), so I don't feel terribly obligated to get involved and try to home school them.

As it happens demand in the transportation sector is way down (except for shipping!), and there are beginning to be layoffs at the TTC and TransLink (in Vancouver), but as of yet not at my firm.  Knock wood.  I mean I don't want to be furloughed, and what I am working on will help with the economic recovery down the road, but I should be able to weather a 2-3 month furlough without too much pain.  Again, I hope it doesn't come to that.

I'm not really a positive person (and certainly not an optimist), though I have made some attempts to filter out my most negative thoughts from the blog.  That said, things could be much worse.  It's looking like Ontario as a whole and even Toronto have done very well in flattening the curve (not as well as B.C. but still pretty good).  Now there is a major and terrible exception which is the condition of the long-term care homes, and I really hope they can get a handle on that situation, but for the average person life is not so bad, assuming of course that you are still employed...  I was just reading that they think close to 25% of New York City residents have been exposed to the virus.  As far as I know, the people I know living in Brooklyn and Queens have not contracted it, which is certainly of great concern to me.

At any rate, this is a somewhat rambling prologue to explain why I haven't been taking up brand new hobbies or learning Sanskrit.  However, I still have been quite productive.  Two weekends ago, I buckled down and got through my US taxes, then I mailed them on the 13th (a couple of days before the official deadline).  In addition to just wanting them done, I was owed a bit of money and thought I should try to get that sooner rather than later...  Then this past weekend I did the Canadian taxes.  I'm definitely getting more efficient at getting them done, but they are still a drag, not least because you have to file separately, so it is twice as much paperwork (and my taxes are complicated to the point I have no choice but to file paper copies).

I then rushed home (I had been biking downtown for exercise and took advantage of my empty office to spread out and fill in the tax forms...) and took the last call from Outside the March's Mundane Mysteries.  I was only giving it half of my attention, and I had pretty clearly missed out on a bunch of clues (while it wasn't quite as involved as an escape room, there were some hints I was supposed to get).  As an aside to the aside, I don't really like escape rooms or this type of mental puzzle, and I might not have signed up in the first place if I had know about the format, but I was mostly trying to support a group of actors, and I succeeded in doing that, at least.

However, I didn't have much time to worry about missing out on the "answer" to my mystery, as I needed to check up on my Zoom session.  I was rehearsing a group of 8 actors in some of my short plays (most but not all have been presented at SFYS over the past two years, though one of them was written last Friday, so definitely hot off the presses!)  So all that past week I was experimenting with how to make Zoom do recordings and what happens to the saved files and so forth.  Between taxes and preparing for the reading (and my actual work), I have been busy indeed!

Things went pretty well, and I think this week I can relax a bit.  I only have two relatively minor tasks.  First to find out how to set up a Youtube channel where I can livestream the Zoom recording (as I can't risk the performance being Zoom-bombed) and second how to set up a Patreon page to see if anyone wants to pay the actors a bit more than the stipend I am offering them.  That's probably one or two evenings worth of work, so the worst is over.  I'll definitely publish the details of the actual reading (which will be Sat. May 2 at 6:30) once I have the Youtube slot lined up.  More details soon.

I mean I have plenty of other things I can do after this, including clean the basement, sew up more masks and perhaps even sign up to do bike deliveries for seniors (though this is apparently being organized through Facebook, and I am just not willing to get a Facebook account, even for such a good cause).  What I haven't really done is taken much time off to really relax, but I don't really do that well when I slow down, especially in a situation like this where there is so much that I am trying to (mentally) avoid.  At any rate, that's how I've been filling my time.  Well, and growing a beard though that is more a question of not bothering to shave, and I think it's coming off this weekend.  I'll post some before and after photos, unless they are truly wretched.

Kid in Candy Store pt. 2

It was about 18 months ago that I talked about how I had taken the plunge and migrated from eMusic to Apple Music/iTunes and I was amazed at just how much music one could stream.  I mean there are entire labels that are off-limits, but what is there is mind-boggling.  Just last week I streamed the entire set of Motown Singles and Unreleased Singles.  I think it works out to several days worth of music when listened to continually.  That is certainly one benefit of working from home, I can play music without headphones (which would definitely be causing me problems if I wore them straight through for that length of time).

I had been much more hesitant to make the move to e-books.  I have read a small number of books on my phone, using Libby, and I had ordered a handful of ebooks from Amazon, which pushed them to a Kindle for PC app.  But I definitely prefer reading physical books, esp. in the winter when I was riding transit more (though I suppose next winter I will try to tough it out and do the winter biking thing...).  Under today's circumstances, with the libraries all closed, I had to look more seriously into figuring this out.  It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found a combination of programs that allowed me to read ebooks from the library almost as well as the Kindle.

I then proceeded to go a little crazy, checking out all kinds of books and also filling up my holds queue to the brim.  (This isn't anything new for me.  There were a few times I hit the upper limit at the library for holds of physical books and there the limit is 100 books!)  I also checked in a bunch of books after only skimming them a bit (since the preview is pretty limited indeed).  In my mind this is the equivalent of browsing books on the shelf.  Unfortunately, this kind of burned through my book limit (and to a lesser degree costs the library as they apparently can only check out the same ebook a set number of times before the book expires and has to be repurchased).  So in that sense, the framework for ebooks is simply not as good for readers or for libraries as standard books.

What's also interesting is that there are some very weird gaps.  So for instance, I understand that the library can't purchase every ebook that someone would like (though there is a process to request missing titles, though only one request per 30 days!).  But for instance, there are a few Italo Calvino books, but not Invisible Cities, which is by far his most famous and arguably most important work.  When you click through to look into requesting the title, there are a few other missing works but not Invisible Cities.  So if you were going to read ebooks exclusively (and you didn't attempt to purchase any books or get them off of shady sites*...), you would never even be aware of Calvino's best work.  And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar examples.**  I think it is true that the most dedicated ebook readers are also heavy consumers of regular books, but 10 or 20 years down the line, the shape of the literary canon may be completely reshaped based on what happens to be available from which ebook sources.  A somewhat depressing thought.†

At any rate, I kind of abused my privileges and was scolded, and they basically froze my account for a week, even though I had never technically gone over my loan or hold limit.  I was starting to stress that I was going to miss out on a hold, but there is actually a pretty cool feature which lets you pass on a hold, so it can go to the next person in line and then you remain at the top of the queue.  So I shouldn't actually miss out on any of my holds when they do come up.  But I will take this to heart and "slow my roll" and focus on borrowing books I have some intention of actually reading.

Going forward, I will start to think more seriously about backing up my enormous library.  I probably only have 10 or so years left in this house before we start thinking seriously about downsizing.  If I was able to find ebook equivalents of 50-75% of the fiction and maybe 10% of the non-fiction (most of this is a bit out of date and was all bought well before the rise of ebooks), then I could focus on squeezing down the rest of the collection to the true essentials without going into a major panic attack and just getting frozen with indecision.  Whether I can actually find someone to take the hard copies off my hands (forget getting paid for them!), is another story.  Fortunately, that is not something I need to deal with today, and I can focus on reading my ebooks primarily for enjoyment and not with a view to making the book prove it is still shelf-worthy.


* I am not talking about Project Gutenberg, which is quite above board and has an amazing array of books in the public domain.

** While not quite in the same league, the library has a reasonable number of Martin Amis novels, including Money, but not London Fields.  Indeed, this is not available to recommend through the library website either.  There are certainly other places to buy and perhaps borrow London Fields as an ebook, but it will probably start to shape people's thinking about what matters in terms of Amis's oeuvre, which is really the problem, more than the immediate accessibility issues.

† Still, thinking back, there have always been classics that have gone out of print, distorting the canon to some extent, and it is possible that more things in the "long tail" remain in print now than they used to.  I do remember that while I was in university, the English lit. professor wanted to assign Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, but it was out of print, and my mother had to go around a bunch of used book stores in Detroit to help us gather enough of the books.  That is one thing that has gotten much, much better with the rise of bookfinder and other internet tools, though the golden age of used bookstores and used CD stores is definitely over.  But it was a pretty amazing thing to live through.  Presumably once a contemporary title has been digitized then it will be available longer than it used to be, though that may not matter if it isn't actually in libraries.

Phone Follies

Even in the best of times, I have a pretty ambivalent relationship with the phone.  I find that nearly all of the calls coming to our land line are spammy and are quite annoying, though it is true that the doctor and dentist offices typically try to reach us on the land line first.  While the government has been trying (completely ineffectually) to crack down on it, robocalls and other unwanted scam calls have completely dominated the airwaves or rather mobilesphere, with one study saying that an unbelievable 45% of all calls nationwide are a scam of one sort or another (and, btw, most of the apps that are supposed to help cut down on spam calls actually sell your data to other companies and most likely then generate even more spam calls).  In my case, as I don't really have family or friends that try to reach me by cell phone, it is probably 90%.  Like most people, I leave my cell phone on silent all the time and simply will not answer it if the number isn't coming from a personal contact (and even then virtually everyone just texts me and doesn't actually call).  As a side note, if everyone did this, we wouldn't have to spend so much time in movie theatres and actual theatres telling people to silence them...

Since the crisis, I have had to do far, far more work from home and am often on the phone for hours.  I probably will lose my voice from time to time, which usually happened about once a year when I was a teacher (many, many years ago).  So I'm not really enjoying that at all.

Anyway, a slightly long set up to an unfortunate incident this evening.  I actually took a call from the land line, and it was a legitimate call, but one I still found a bit unsettling, since anything involving my personal finances and someone knowing my name on the phone makes me suspicious.  So in that sense I was primed.  I also was pretty exhausted, as I have been pushing too hard this past week.  Later in the evening, I got a call from a private number and ignored it.  Then it called back and I answered, and the person asked for me, then started by saying something like "This may surprise you, but you and I have something in common."  I said "No" and hung up, and then ignored the follow up call.

It was an hour later that I realized this call was part of Outside the March's Mundane Mystery series.  I felt like a complete idiot, as it had completely slipped my mind the call was coming.  They had even warned participants that the call would come from a private line (and the call did come at the correct time).  In my defence, it was not the person that was I expecting to talk to (I had spoken with someone else on Monday, and this was a male not a female as before), and the script they used was incredibly triggering for me, almost exactly like a typical scam set-up.  I thought that they were supposed to leave a message or something if they didn't make the connection, but that didn't happen, and I honestly don't know if they will call tomorrow.  I'm not even sure I care any longer, given that I flaked out and missed out on a whole session.  There was another theatre company that was going to try this, and I know for sure that I won't participate in that one.  I've even given up on the two companies that are trying Instagram things, since I hate that format so much.  I'll stick to Zoom sessions from here on out.

Frustrating Night

The bad news coming from the States (which I will filter out for the time being) just keeps piling on.  Also, the cancellations keep getting pushed further and further back, so now it looks like the whole summer will be wiped out (I just learned that the Toronto Fringe has thrown in the towel already, along with the Edinburgh Fringe, not that I was going to be heading over to Scotland anytime soon).

As it happens, I was looking forward to seeing an improvised murder mystery from the Howland Company.  However, instead of using Zoom like everyone else, they decided to get cute and do this on Instagram Live.  I really hate signing up for things, and I completely draw the line at Facebook, but I went ahead and got an Instagram account.  Then I couldn't see any video or updated posts, so I have no idea what they are actually attempting to do.  So I am going to cross this off my list of things to do and try to finish reading one of the on-line books, which will vanish off my phone fairly soon.

I also had heard it was the super moon tonight -- and we should have been able to see the International Space Station streaking across the sky.  Of course it is raining and still fairly cold out, so even that was a wash-out (literally).  Virtually every time there is supposed to be a meteor shower or a full moon, we have overcast skies, which just sucks.

There are a few bright spots, but most of them are things to look forward to next week and nothing to lift my spirits tonight.  So I think I will just sign off and stew for a while. 

On-line arts/theatre -- Early April update

I've been checking out the Stars in the House series as a benefit for the Actors Fund (and yes I did make a small donation).  I'm going to be honest and say that Tales of the Allergist's Wife, which ran as a Saturday matinee, was just not for me.  It was mostly a lot of Jewish kvetching (and a mother who called for Dr. Kevorkian three times), and ended with the couple, challenged in a relatively minor way, expelling the outsider and going back into their bubble.  (It's a little amusing that some people still feel it should have won the Tony instead of Proof, or Stoppard's The Invention of Love for that matter.)  I also really was not enjoying the NT's One Man, Two Guvnors, as it was much too broad for my tastes.  That said, it is still very much worth supporting the arts in these trying times.

Tonight, starting at 8 pm, there will be a live-streaming of Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart.  McNally was a fairly early US victim of coronavirus, so it is a particularly fitting tribute.  I've seen the play (and probably on Broadway, though I'll have to doublecheck my Playbill collection), but I plan on tuning in for this and seeing how a new cast handles it.  Even with all the limitations of Zoom, it should still be interesting.

Update: I thought they pulled together a very strong cast for the reading of Lips Together, Teeth Apart.  It does appear to be archived, though it may be only for a few days or a week or longer.  Do watch sooner rather than later if interested (and of course please donate if you feel so moved).  I suppose it does help when they have the enthusiastic support of McNally's spouse, who can make the rights available for longer than a single livestream.  I was having very bad connection issues for the second half of the first act, but I was able to resolve them during the intermission while Nathan Lane was talking and the rest was fortunately much better.  I was able to check my archives, and I did see this on Broadway in 1992 in its original run.  Nathan Lane, who originated the role of Sam Truman, had decamped, but Christine Baranski was still playing the role of Chloe Haddock.  (1992 was a good year for me, as I saw Alan Alda in Neil Simon's Jake's Women that same week!)  It's an interesting play, with the fear of AIDS (and a more general dread of modern life) suffusing the play.  I'm not really in that business any longer, but I could envision a good academic article pairing Lips Together, Teeth Apart and DeLillo's White Noise.

FYI - there are a few art galleries trying to move into the digital realm during the lockdown.  I haven't watched it yet, but the Tate's Warhol exhibit has a short virtual tour on video.  This article lists a number of Toronto-based virtual tours, and I will definitely be checking more of them out over the next couple of weeks.