Swimming in Circles

No question the gym routine can feel (on bad weeks) as being on an endless hamster wheel.  I don't jog laps at the gym any more, since I haven't had access to track facilities since roughly 2000 (when I was at Northwestern).  I generally have done fairly well sticking to going to the gym every other day though sometimes I do take two days off in a row.  Tonight, I am not going to the gym, but I am going swimming, which is nearly as good.  

I guess it's been three or four weeks that I have finally figured out the new system for booking a swimming lane on the eFun system, and I try to swim once a week.  Before that, I did a bit of swimming at the hotel pool in Ottawa.  But that's it since COVID started.  I'm pretty much back to my previous level of swimming 15 or 16 laps per session.  That's a bit gratifying.  I would like to go back to the Regent Park pool, but because it is free, it is always over-subscribed, so I just book at Matty Eckler (where it costs $4/session) which is usually nearly empty.  That's certainly a better deal than when I signed up for a 3 month pass at Matty Eckler, which I never really took full advantage of.

Anyway, I finally dared to get on the scale at the gym.  It wasn't quite where I had hoped to be, but better than I expected (given the stress eating that I am only slowly ramping down).  I could probably hit my first target (of many!) if I stopped eating cereal in the mornings.  I'm not quite ready for that, but maybe in a few more weeks, depending on whether I indulge too much over the holidays...

Hopefully it won't be so cold tonight than my hair feels like it will freeze off.  That won't help now that I have finally integrated swimming back into my fitness routine.

Graffiti Bridge

There is a pedestrian bridge near my house.  It is routinely tagged up with all kinds of scribbles.  During the pandemic, many of the messages got more political, which is hardly a surprise. Also not a surprise is when a message appeared that was supportive of Black Lives Matter, it was taken down fairly quickly.  

There seems to be one very active tagger in the neighbourhood, and this appears to be his main mark.

I've seen it at bus stops and telephone booths (the few that are left).*  One night he got super ambitious and tagged the windows of an abandoned shop on Pape Ave.

A few weeks back, he put up some new marks (I'm positive it's the same guy).  The first one is quite intricate, but I think I like the cat with big eyes a bit more.  

Supposedly, this bridge will be replaced with a underpass tunnel under the train tracks, assuming the Lakeshore East line is electrified in a few years.  I mentioned this to my daughter, and she said she didn't think she'd like that, though I don't know if it was losing the view of downtown Toronto that bothered her or something else.  I guess I'll believe it when I see them digging the tunnel...

* And on a newspaper box!  How boss is that!?  (I mean to even find one that still exists.)

More Literary Disappointments

I see that I already expounded at great length on how much I hated Faulkner's A Fable, so no point in going on about that again.  I do sort of run hot and cold on Faulkner.  While I have gone through quite a lot of Faulkner (10 novels and a handful of stories) there is still more to go.  I probably should read The Wild Palms next before tackling the Snopes Trilogy.

I do think that Hemingway's reputation will continue to sink.  There are several novels that are going to be completely off-limits in schools due to extensive and gratuitous use of the N-word (and indeed I assume The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (an infinitely better novel than Hemingway's To Have and Have Not) cannot be assigned in most classroom settings or even discussed at most universities given how frequently there are calls to fire white instructors using the N-word no matter the context).  But also so many Hemingway characters embody toxic masculinity in an uncomplicated way and are just not likely to be seen as appealing in the future.  I actually got into a row with someone on an internet chatroom over this.

I wasn't crazy about Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, though the last two chapters were quite good.  I definitely am not sure it deserves being on the Modern Library's 100 Best Books list (at #11 no less!).  I also wasn't crazy about Maugham's Of Human Bondage, which comes in at #66.   I suppose it cut a bit too deep reading about a young man throwing himself at a woman not worth his attention/affections (and at such length too*).

Joyce Cary's First Trilogy isn't on the Modern Library list, but it's on similar lists.  I have mentioned how the the portrayal of domestic violence against women in the first and presumably third novel really make them unpalatable.  And the middle novel, To Be a Pilgrim, is so incredibly boring and far, far too long.  It looks like I will finish Pilgrim in another couple of days.  I'm going to take a short detour and read Wharton's The Age of Innocence and wrap up Hornby's High Fidelity before starting in on The Horse's Mouth, which I don't think I will care for.  However, if you are only going to read one novel by Cary, it probably should be The Horse's Mouth, and it would indeed be perverse to skip it after having read the first two books in the trilogy.  But this will definitely be the last Cary that I do read, as he is just not to my taste at all.

* Now I have much more empathy recalling how I wearied some of my friends with endless emails about a similar situation I went through during my grad school days.  

COP 26 - A Cop Out

Thousands upon thousands of words have already been spilled over COP26 and the fact that these conferences lead to very little tangible improvements.  Certainly there are a few positives, including laying the groundwork for more carbon pricing and shaming most but not all countries into reducing coal burning and deforestation. But the scale of the problem is just too large, to completely transform power generation in less than a generation.  It doesn't help that most (though not all) environmentalists are passionately against nuclear power, which could have met some needs, particularly in countries that don't have abundant sunshine, though this would have had to have been done (carefully) over the past 20-30 years.  Now it is too late to ramp up in any meaningful way.  

Politicians are simply unwilling to face up to the fact that societies have to live within the earth's means and that means far less consumption than we have now, but then that means that a huge swath of the population (and not just the relatively small number of people employed in the fossil fuel sector) will be unemployed or underemployed.  Our political system is simply not geared up for such an outcome, and that's why so much of the discussion ends up being around magic technological solutions that are simply never going to come true.  I do think a lot of environmentalists simply don't see or acknowledge the upheaval that these fundamental shifts will require; it's not just the energy firms that will balk.  Similarly, there are a lot of planners who say switching to electric cars is pointless and everyone has to walk, cycle or take transit.  All I can say is that this will not happen, no matter how much they want this because metro areas are simply not set up in such a fashion to make this truly feasible.

Also, there is a lot of disagreement over just what has to be done.  You have some experts calling for a gradual decline in aviation while alternative jet fuel is worked out, whereas George Monbiot is literally telling everyone to stop flying today.  I feel in general I have lived a fairly low carbon lifestyle (for someone in North America that is) with no car for the last ten years, and indeed I have never in my life regularly commuted by car, though I did drive a fair bit in my teens.  I've been vegetarian, though not vegan, for 30 years, which also is lower impact.  But still I think about how hard it would be in my own life to completely give up flying, and I really don't travel that often, trying to take the train when feasible.  Maybe they really will restore the train link between Windsor and Detroit, so that a Toronto-Detroit-Chicago train becomes possible (though still drastically slower than flying).  I'd probably be willing to take that once in a while to lower my emissions, but I wouldn't take the train to Vancouver for instance.  And I would like to make it back to Europe a few times before I die.  So in that sense virtually everyone is a hypocrite and will not do "everything is takes," and it is the same story pretty much everywhere.

I don't think there is any sugar coating the fact that humans will not make the necessary sacrifices.  That's not to say there will be no improvements, but we're going to have to figure out how to live with a planet that is going to overheat.  I think moving to the GTA was probably the right move, as it won't flood (like Vancouver or even NYC) and the warmer weather isn't likely to be life-threatening as it will likely be in much of the US South.  All things considered, Canada will probably come out ahead, but this is only relatively speaking.  If some of the worst predictions come true, then even being up here only buys us another 10 or 20 years.  Of course, it might not be that bad, and perhaps they will magically suck the CO2 and methane out of the air, saving us all, but I don't think that is particularly likely.  I think the next 50-100 years are likely to be pretty grim indeed, at least at the global scale, though there may be places that largely ride out the storm (perhaps Ontario).  For certain, this is one of the few times I hope to be proven wrong.

15th Canadian Challenge - 9th Review - Porny Stories

I thought I would enjoy this book (Porny Stories by Eva Moran) more than I actually did.  While the book blurb called her a modern-day Woody Allen, I thought she was more in the Fran Lebowitz line. I think more than anything it felt a bit too repetitive; Donald Barthelme wrote up a few fake quizzes but it was only a small part of his oeuvre, whereas roughly half or more of these pieces are fake Cosmo-style quizzes.  And it just seems like Moran is shooting fish in a barrel again and again.  Cosmopolitan Magazine quizzes have been mocked for decades, and often the writers do dig into the self-loathing (on the part of single ladies) that enables them in the first place.  What is a bit different is just how sexually explicit many of the pieces are, but, in this day and age, nothing's shocking.

In truth, the only piece that I really liked (without reservations) was a very short story called "Julius Caesar: A Play Review."  It starts out with a high school student attending a "uber-pc" First Nations interpretation of Julius Caesar (perhaps like the Crows' Nest fake-out earlier in the season should have been).  She complains a bit that the author shouldn't have killed off the title character so early.  But she was really at the play to spy on Margaret Atwood, who she deeply admires.  She doesn't hesitate to say that "I definitely do not think she's 'old.'  I see her another way. ...  So beyond time and the age thing."

She then imagines a scenario where after death you arrive at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks you the last book you read.  "You answer with dignified dignity, 'Bear.' "  And presto, you're riding a chute to Hell.  "You barely have time to gasp, 'But it won the Governor's General Award!'"*  St. Peter calls after you, saying that you should have read The Handmaid's Tale.  (Given The Handmaid's Tale's clear attack on the misogynistic aspects of so many religions and their insistence on controlling women's reproductive lives, this does seem an unusual vote of confidence in the book...)

The narrator then follows Atwood around at the reception after the play where she takes one of everything from the buffet, then vanishes.  The narrator imagines she is in the washroom and imagines discovering her there and becoming bosom buddies with the Queen of CanLit.  (As one more amusing aside, the play is premiering at Buddies in Bad Times!)  

The review ends, "Yeah, Julius Caesar's good.  But Margaret Atwood, now she's cool."  Hard to argue with that.  I've seen her a few times in person, and it's always a bit of a thrill.

I wish Moran had written a lot more along these lines and included far fewer mocking Cosmo reader quiz pieces.  But then I guess her collection wouldn't have had such a hook, merited or not.

* And indeed, more than one blog has tackled the incongruity of that...  I also wrote about this in my review of Bear a while back.

15th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Mr. Blue

This was another book that was dropped off in my Little Free Library: Mr. Blue by Jacques Poulin.  Mr. Blue is actually the name of a cat owned (that is, if cats can be "owned") by a middle-aged writer who lives by himself on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.  He is still struggling to get over a break-up, and he also seems somewhat stuck in his latest writing project.  One day he finds someone has parked a boat nearby and appears to be living at least part-time in a natural cave.  He discovers a book (The Arabian Nights) and essentially dreams up an unknown woman ("Marika") that he falls for; she also becomes a bit of a muse for him, though it doesn't seem that he actually gets much further in his writing...  

SPOILERS AHEAD

Other people enter the picture, and while they claim to know Marika, it is just as likely that they are just humouring him in his delusions.  It is left unclear by the end of the novel whether Marika truly existed or was just a figment of his imagination, though my money is on her non-existence.  In a slightly strange twist, he more or less adopts a young woman, as a kind of surrogate daughter.  The writing (or at least the translation) is fairly flat and affectless, and the whole book is sort of infused with a melancholy air.  Here's a slightly longer take on Mr. Blue.

15th Canadian Challenge - 7th Review - Binge

I must have been reading the on-line review of Douglas Coupland's Binge, as when I went to put it on hold at the library the line ahead of me wasn't long at all (as it would be after the print version appeared).  Ironically, it took several days for the e-book version to become available, and I am sort of in the middle of the queue for that.  Why would I want the e-book version, after I have read the book in hard copy?  Well, the book's structure -- 60 very short stories of 4 pages with many shared characters -- makes it hard to keep track of how the characters are linked.  It would be much easier to do a search on "Julie" or "Leah" to see how often they cropped up in others' stories than to flip through the book over and over again.

In some ways, this feels like an even more extreme version of Altman's Short Cuts (where he combined characters from Carver stories that didn't actually overlap in the originals).  The stories aren't particularly chronological, and it doesn't seem as if this is supposed to cohere into some mega-novel (as Cortazar's Hopscotch does, sort of).  It's a bit more like looking a story about a mid-sized city on Wikipedia and then randomly clicking on some of the links to find out more about key characters.  Pretty much everybody gets their minute in the sun, but with only 4 pages we get only a glimpse, either into whatever is preoccupying them at the moment or, just as likely, some major (traumatic) incident from their past that brought them to that point in their lives.  It will make me sense if/when you read some of the stories on your own.

In some cases, two stories just show the inner thoughts of each character as they go through a meeting, such as "Dasani" and "Effexor."  We also have a cynical anti-O. Henry story in the paired stories "Unleaded" and "Lurking Account" where a man starts cheating on his dying wife, while, unbeknownst to him, she is having an affair with one of the hospice workers.  

If this were a novel in (many) pieces, then I think we would have found out more why Ned was recruiting Isaac (after a breakdown partially covered in the stories "Lego" and "Sharpies"), but this thread seems to have been dropped, unless I just missed the connection.

I'm not sure there is enough plot in Binge to really be SPOILED, but just in case, SPOILERS AHEAD.

In the 2nd half, Coupland's peeks into others people's lives gets progressively darker, and we meet up with a woman who has her husband knocked off, and then starts feeding fentanyl-laced drugs to her co-conspirator to cover her tracks ("Oxy") and a disturbing number of people that just happen to have bodies stashed away in their cargo carriers.  I'm still trying to work out why one man was attacked and stuffed into one of these carriers (still alive as the story ended though presumably not for much longer...).  This is where doing an electronic search would come in very handy, as I might be able to cross-reference something in one of the other stories.

Most the characters seem to be on the younger-side of Gen X or Millennials, though Coupland also delves into the lives of their children (Gen Zers), though not always as convincingly.  COVID crops up in a few of the stories, but not really that many.  There is a SARS survivor who can't quite believe he has to worry about yet another pandemic, and one which will almost certain kill him after the number SARS did on his lungs ("IKEA Ball Pit").  This is just as well, as I wouldn't want to read 60 stories about people dealing with COVID in various ways. There were a couple of stories that I could relate to, including getting too caught up in stock speculation and almost losing a bundle ("Risk Aversion"), which will happen to the GameStop investors and probably the BitCoin enthusiasts as well.  Anyway, it is quite easy to get in over one's head...  The other one was a throw-away line in the story "Thong" where the narrator comments on how many people lie about where they were on 9/11.  That is no doubt true, but it is equally true that I was working in Manhattan in Penn Plaza on 9/11.  I heard from some of the others that there was smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers and got to the window in time to see the second plane hit the 2nd tower. It will be something I remember forever, unless Alzheimer's gets me first.

Given the nature of the stories and the way they jump around, a lot of ground is covered in Binge, but it isn't going to be satisfying if you want to follow through on what happened next or even keep following a character that you found intriguing in four pages but then was dropped.  I didn't have time to read through the entire book in one sitting (binge-reading), but I don't think there was a time I stopped with just one either.

Edit (11/15): Having borrowed the e-book version, I can confirm that Coupland leaves the reader hanging in several cases.  We never find out what Ned has in mind for Isaac, and it remains a mystery why one man attacked another in one of the last stories in Binge.  C'est dommage.