You can blame it on me

As I mentioned, the Barenaked Ladies have started doing an acoustic version of Blame It On Me.  I suspect they did it in concert first and then decided it went so well that they rerecorded the stripped down version for Odds Are.  Here is a little peek into the recording sessions, and here is a pretty good live version from a couple of years ago (with the TSO no less).  I don't think the Thurs/Fri concerts have made their way to YouTube yet, but I'll keep an eye out.

While this is only a fairly simple pop song about love, there is something so important about taking responsibility for ones actions.  It isn't fun, but it is more adult, and I do sort of pride myself on taking responsibility -- most of the time.

I'm quite frustrated that I missed my window to get to Buffalo, but there truly is no one to blame but myself.  I stayed up way too late reading and blogging and finishing making the holiday cards.  A few years ago I probably would have managed to wake myself up on only a few hours of sleep (and indeed the bus to Seattle left at really ungodly hours -- there are a few slightly more reasonable times to catch the Greyhound to Buffalo, though the 8 am slot is probably the best).  If I had gotten up 15 minutes earlier, I still would have had a shot at the 9:15 bus, but given the poor travel conditions, I might not have made it.  I suspect that given I was waiting until the last, last minute to reserve a seat on the bus, at the back of my mind I knew I wasn't going to make it.  The weather looks kind of the same for next weekend, but I will make the effort to get out.  I think I only have 3 more weeks before the show at the Albright-Knox Museum closes.

So I'll post a couple of pictures of Toronto covered in snow, as I might as well take the opportunity to try to wrap up Christmas shopping this weekend, so I don't feel quite so low and frustrated with myself, even though I have to take the blame for Buffalo.  (As I am trying to rationalize last night, I can tell myself that I didn't actually lose any money and I avoided a lot of football traffic, which might have made the border a dicey proposition, even on the bus.  But I am only partly succeeding...)

8th Canadian Challenge - 10th review - The Girl Who was Saturday Night

I ended up reading this book (Heather O'Neill's The Girl Who was Saturday Night) much sooner than I expected, as I thought it would take at least another month to turn up at the library.  It was a pretty quick read, however, at least in part because the majority of the chapters were short.

The story is set in late 1994 and 1995, and indeed the 1995 referendum on Quebec's independence becomes central to the story.  I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this period, though actually I am working on a story set in 1993/94 and I am focusing on Toronto, where people paid very little attention to the separatist threat until the very tail end of 1994.  There were quite a number of upheavals in Ontario as well, though most of those were 1996 and '97 (particularly the amalgamation of Toronto, which was pushed through in 6 months).  That's one of the things that is hard to get used to about Canada, that things can change in the blink of an eye, relatively speaking, particularly when compared to the glacial change of political institutions in the U.S.  Though the status quo is pretty enduring.  I hope it isn't considered a spoiler to reveal that the people of Quebec voted Non in an incredibly close election (51% to 49%).  It was actually closer than the recent referendum on Scottish independence.  Several observers do wonder if there had been another week or two if the Oui vote would have prevailed.  I haven't read it yet, but Chantal Herbert's book is all about what might have happened had Quebec voted for independence, as it wasn't at all clear how things would have unfolded.

As I mentioned in passing in this post, it is always tricky when appropriating others' stories. (For instance, I definitely have to question the wisdom of writing a history of a family named "Tremblay," when that territory was already staked out by Michel Tremblay.)  I don't say that authors shouldn't write about characters outside their class, but it can always get dicey.  In this case, O'Neill is writing pretty extensively about a bohemian class that she doesn't really seem to fit into.  Her background is basically a reasonably privileged Anglo who went to McGill. (In this sense, Gabrielle Roy, or even Michel Tremblay for that matter, will get a pass when writing about the working poor in The Tin Flute or in Les Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal, but I had trouble swallowing it from O'Neill who just cannot really fathom what it is to be Quebecois, no matter how much time she spent among them.)  The only character who remotely inhabits her world is Adam, the occasional boyfriend of Nouschka Tremblay.  What was interesting to me is that delving into this bohemian and/or working poor class didn't bother me too much at the start of the book, but my reservations kept increasing as it went along, particularly in the chapters focused on the referendum and its immediate aftermath.  There is a lot of discussion about the Quebecois and their penchant for backing the wrong horse in a race, etc. that would be somewhat acceptable if written by a Francophone, but coming from O'Neill just seems like she is starting to channel Mordecai Richler.

All that said, I did like this very short passage.  Nouschka is taking Loulou, her somewhat frail grandfather, to the doctor and generally is not too impressed with the doctor's treatment: "'Are you voting Oui ou Non?' That got his attention. The doctor looked up at the old babbling lunatic, whose Oui vote could put on end to the life he was enjoying. English speakers had an absolute horror of separation, and scores of them had left after the first referendum. Loulou smiled innocently at the doctor."

Nouschka is the Saturday Night girl from the title.  It is never spelled out where she gets that title, and I don't believe she is ever called that by anyone in the novel itself, but it probably comes from her wanted to have a good time and not caring much about the consequences.  Her twin brother, Nicolas, may be an even more extreme case, but she generally favours short term pleasures over longer-term goals.  However, she ends up the only person in her family who graduated from high school and she is even making plans for college, though these are constantly in danger of being thwarted for a variety of reasons I'll go into after the spoiler break.  For a pretty decent spoiler-free review, you can look here.

Ok, SPOILERS follow.

I have to say given the huge number of stray cats that pass through the small apartments on Montreal's Boulevard Saint-Laurent, I wonder if O'Neill was ever tempted to call the book The Girl with the Morals of a Cat, since she seems to have slept with most of the young men on the street and even some older ones.  (She explains this by saying everyone in Montreal slept together due to the cold -- again, maybe O'Neill is going just a bit too far here.)  It's not that surprising that Nouschka gets pregnant.  What is more surprising is that she waits until she is married and is 20 years old.  Her twin got a 15 or 16 year old girl pregnant when they were both in their teens.  And the twins' mother bore them at 14 and then abandoned them.  Their father is a legendary (in Quebec) folk-singer who is almost never around, so they are raised in squalor by their grandfather.  (Now I like cats, but the idea that cats from the neighbourhood are allowed in and out of everyone's apartments and are getting into food and such was just disgusting.)  The twins are all but inseparable, which is frequently tied to their growing up motherless and essentially fatherless. That's understandable, but then for them to sleep in the same unmade bed (unless one is having sex in it), surrounded by filth, was just another case of O'Neill taking it that one step too far.

However, Nouschka decides that she can only make something of her life (like graduate night school and keep her job) by starting to put some distance between her and her brother.  They have tried and failed at this in the past, and she takes the fairly radical step of marrying Rafael Lemieux, the only other young man even more emotionally volatile than her brother.  He was once a champion figure skater but let the pressure get to him and he cracked.  Like everyone else on the street (apparently) he dropped out of school and got into petty crime, including some drug dealing and illegally breeding dogs (perhaps for dog fights).  Anyway, people treat him as if he is a ticking time bomb, though he manages to keep down a job as a hospital orderly for most of the novel.  There is much that is not revealed about Rafael's past, though I started wondering whether O'Neill wanted to hint that he had been sexually abused by his skating coach.  I'm not saying that is what she was implying, but I started to get a feeling that only a secret of that magnitude would completely explain his erratic behaviour.

While the wedding is quite a success (and her father shows up and sings his wedding song, making it a red letter day for the street), it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the marriage is pretty rocky.  Nicholas keeps trying to butt in and break up the marriage.  Eventually the pressures of having a baby and, to a slightly lesser extent, the referendum cause the two to separate.  Things spiral out of control for Rafael, and even for Nicolas, who needs to pay $3000 in child support before he can visit his child.  Crime beckons, though I guess I am grateful that O'Neill didn't come up with a scheme where both Rafael and Nicolas went in on the same caper, as that would have been just too trite.

While I don't really want to reveal it, I found the ending to be a bit too optimistic, given all that had come before.  (Actually, one of these days I'll have to reread Slesinger's The Unpossessed to see how she wraps up a novel about Greenwich Village bohemians, who might even have been more f'ed up than these latter-day misfits (ill-matched lovers, crazed poets, and small-time crooks, often all at the same time).)  The Girl Who was Saturday Night is definitely worth a read, but I am very glad not to have to meet any of these individuals up close, particularly late at night in a dark alley in Montreal...

Barenaked Christmas concert

So I am back from sort of a strange concert.  I was actually supposed to go yesterday, but then the school scheduled a winter concert and I had to scramble to exchange my ticket for tonight.  Even though I had to pay to upgrade, it seemed to work out for the best.  The seats next to me were empty (probably people having trouble traveling with the extra snow on the roads).  Anyway, the concert was billed as holiday songs mixed in with some of Barenaked Ladies greatest hits.

First off, I don't even think they got to 1/3 of the material being holiday songs, though perhaps if you count "Snowman" and "Green Christmas" it gets close to that.  Second, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but the full TSO was playing behind them on nearly all songs.  It turns out that Andrew Creegan (one of the founding members, but no longer officially with the band) scored most of the songs for orchestra, and in some cases the arrangements were quite interesting.  Actually "Pinch Me" had so much going on that I didn't even recognize it for a while.  I think the one thing I would have changed would be have brought the vocals up in the mix a bit more, but it wasn't a huge problem.

I guess this makes the 3rd time I've seen them.  The first time was also in Toronto in 1993 when the Creegans were playing part of a Christmas show headlined by Sarah McLachlan.  I can't recall who else was there, but there were a few other Toronto-based bands.  Anyway, the Creegans did a song or two and then, surprise, surprise, the other members of Barenaked Ladies joined them and they did a few songs.  I have no real recollection of what they did, but I have to assume it was "Brian Wilson" and "If I Had a Million Dollars."

Then five or so years ago, they played Chicago during a summer festival (it was 2009, so Steve Page had just left the band).  It was the Taste of Chicago.  The setlist looks pretty good, though no "Blame It on Me," perhaps because it isn't much of a kids' song.  I think had we still been living in the South Loop, I would have taken my son.  I kind of hope they play a summer festival in 2015 or 2016, as I think the kids would enjoy them.  There were quite a few kids in attendance tonight, but the late night and the steep ticket prices kept me from bringing my kids.  The weird thing was the average age of the fans was 5 to 10 years older than me, whereas I thought I was basically a pretty typical fan from way back when.  I guess they really are a Toronto institution if they can consistently pull a much older crowd (than even the band members).

So they kicked off with the Bruce Cockburn cover "Lovers in a Dangerous Time."  The first set ended with "Brian Wilson."  I believe it was in the second set that they did an acoustic version of "Blame It On Me" without the orchestra backing them at all.  This may in fact be my favourite track off of Gordon, so I was really glad I hear them do it. I thought the version of "One Week" that they did was quite interesting -- it almost sounded like a trance version and there was some interesting xylophone support from the percussion section.  They wrapped up with a solid version of "Million Dollars" with the crowd encouraged to sing along at the end.  Then they did their patented mash up of rap and other current hits -- I didn't know most of them other than Lorde's "Royals."  The encore was "Feliz Navidad," which was certainly appropriate, though I had really been hoping for "The Old Apartment," which was the only major hit that was left out, as far as I can remember.  I would definitely have preferred they dropped "Boomerang" in exchange for "The Old Apartment."  Well, I'll probably hear that the next time I see them.  Anyway, it was a very upbeat and often funny concert with the band members razzing each other a bit, as they are wont to do.

Definitely worth seeing, but it is still hard to believe that Gordon was released over 20 years ago.  That's the kind of stuff that makes you feel old.  I am sorry that I missed the McLachlan concert back in Nov., but Massey Hall doesn't have nearly as many seats as one might imagine, and by the time I tried to book, the only seats left were quite expensive ones with restricted views.  I wasn't going to go for that, so I'll just see if she tours next year or in 2016 and try to be a bit more on the ball next time.  But it really does sort of seem that musically at least my early 90s obsessions are coming back around, even if they aren't doing full blown tours.  It's a bit eerie actually.  Well, at least I know for certain that Moxy Fruvous won't be reforming and touring...

Slumming It (Payne's Nebraska)

I've now tried but failed to get through Payne's Nebraska for the second time.  The first time I just timed out without watching more than a few minutes.  This time around the DVD came from the library at another awkward time (my wife's father was in town) but I made more of an effort, but still only made it 1/3 of the way through before giving up.  If I had more time, I might have made it through, but it is possible that I would have still bailed, and I want to explore this a bit further in this post.

There is no question that the writing is pretty sharp, and there are quite a few funny lines, but I started to feel almost a bit dirty watching this, as if it were some voyeuristic look into the lives of the working poor.  I really make an effort to avoid watching "reality TV" for basically the same reason.  Clearly many people are just trying to feel better about their own lives by comparing themselves to the truly clueless or at least hapless folks who open up for the cameras.  I guess it isn't so bad in the case of the rich clueless (Paris Hilton and the Osbornes) who end up laughing all the way to the bank, but for the lower class it really is pretty exploitative.  Of course, how different is this for TV shows that sort of simultaneously mocked and elevated the working (or scheming) classes (Steptoe and Son and its US incarnation Sanford and Son, Only Fools and Horses, My Name is Earl)?  I don't really have an answer, other than I didn't watch these other shows with any regularity, aside from My Name is Earl and even that I think I stopped around Season 2.

To be clear, I am not saying that creators don't have the moral right to write these kind of characters, though personally I feel better about watching or reading a work of art (about the poor) if it seems drawn on the creator's experience and not just a look in on others' lives.  So I much prefer the peek in on well-heeled alcoholics in Sideways, as it seems a lot closer to what Payne knows well (compared to Nebraska).  I guess there is a bit of hypocrisy in that I occasionally work on a play about a Black barber who gets in way over his head when his ex-wife tries to repossess his shop.  This is a case where the story wants to write itself and I'll just have to accept others telling me that I should not have written it, so it had better be truly great to make it worth the grief I'll surely get from others.

In general, I have far fewer problems with novels set among the poor, largely because authors are far more familiar with poverty than mainstream film makers, who may have come from modest backgrounds (though increasingly this isn't the case) but now live in a totally different world.  It's quite common for authors to be struggling financially.  As it happens, I am midway through The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O'Neill. It's sort of a mirror into a lower class neighbourhood populated by artistic types. The setting is not dissimilar to the ones Barbara Comyns wrote about or Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed or some of the novels set in Greenwich Village in the 70s or the Lower East Side in the 80s and very early 90s. I believe this novel is set in the very early 90s (before the 1995 Referendum) but I am not entirely sure. It's one of those novels where the characters are interesting, but I'd want to stay 100 feet away from any one of them in real life.

But to return to my broader point, it isn't just the fact that the characters in Nebraska are fairly poor and the main character is an alcoholic, it is that the whole thing plays out as a rural in-joke.  Depending on where one lives in the midwest, there are fairly significant state rivalries.  Michigan and Ohio have a long-standing grudge against each other, and the same is true of Illinois and Indiana.  Wisconsin seems to have rivalries with both Minnesota and Illinois.  And Iowa and Missouri seem to have no love lost between them.  I'm not from the west, but perhaps the same thing happens out there.  Does Montana have a serious regional rivalry with Wyoming?  What I'm not aware of is Montana looking down its nose at the hicks in Nebraska, but that is certainly what the movie implies.

Almost everyone that the main character meets in Montana tells him to his face that he is misled (or being a complete idiot -- according to his wife) but he decides to go off to claim his prize from the Publisher's Clearing House.  It is only when the man (and his enabler son) end up in the man's hometown in Nebraska that almost everyone believes he has suddenly come into this fortune, and not one probes to find out that it is a mirage.  It's like a town of simpletons in an I.B. Singer story.  The portrayal of Nebraska as emptied out of any real potential or sensible men (even compared to Montana which seems no great shakes) is just so negative that I can't take it, even if there is a large grain of truth in the impact of rural depopulation on top of the deindustrialization of the Midwest.  Indeed, my extended family is all in Iowa, which is generally suffering the same fate as Nebraska, though with a few mid-sized cities that are getting by.

But beyond that, I have trouble watching films where people start fighting over money and inheritances (which is the territory that Nebraska was heading into when I bailed).  Again, ironic in that one of my plays puts this front and center, and old money is invoked in Corporate Codes of Conduct.  Maybe if I work out those issues for myself, I'd be more inclined to watch Payne's Nebraska.

Finally, the back of the DVD case keeps talking about how this old wastrel finds some kind of redemption on this trip.  I mean how many movies about the redemption of drunks do we need?  It seems a pretty cheap kind of grace if one can find it on a road trip with one's son after an entire lifetime of being a failure (and a fairly surly bastard at that).  I really don't go for these kind of movies and have never watched Leaving Las Vegas or Barfly and don't intend to.  I'm not completely opposed to "redemption" movies, and I quite liked Bringing Out the Dead, but it has to actually be earned, not just some sappy lines about how the protagonist suddenly realizes that family is what really matters (and that he is actually proud of his cipher of a son) or some such tripe.  I'm so convinced that Nebraska is going to have such a lousy, sentimental ending that I don't want to waste my time finding out.  Surely that is unfair, but combined with my general unease over the treatment of the Nebraskans and the unseemliness of the upcoming fight over money, this movie just isn't for me.  Maybe at another point in my life I will be willing to give it another chance and let its strengths (particularly the comic dialog) offset my reservations. 

Toronto - second and third impressions

Having lived through an interminable election cycle and coming up on our 6 month anniversary (back) in the city, I thought it was time for a few comments on my impressions.

Real estate is shockingly expensive.  Probably slightly lower than Vancouver for what you actually get, but certainly many properties are overpriced.  And yet, we'll have to find something, if only to make sure we are anchored fairly close to the kids' schools.  I decided to pass on a property because it would be extremely difficult to carve out another foot or two of head space in the basement and am now having second thoughts, given how rarely anything turns up in our desired area.  I guess we've got several months left, but I have the sinking feeling that that was probably the best we are going to see.  And I really didn't want to change their schools.

Toronto is really cramped.  As I related here, the City Hall plaza is just too small and unsafe for the various functions that it hosts.  Eric Miller said it well when he said that Toronto functioned pretty well for a city of 1.5 million, but was floundering at 3 million.  The streetcars are very overwhelmed during rush hour, though they aren't too bad otherwise.  Just getting into and out of the subway is a chore with not enough space for people to get up and down stairs safely, and the transfer point at Yonge and Bloor is a complete mess (St. George is a bit better, which is where I generally transfer).  Transit politics are a nightmare, with quite a few projects cancelled by the Conservatives years ago and then the one thing City Hall finally agreed on was an expensive subway that served far fewer people than the proposed LRT (hmm, sounds sort of like Vancouver transit politics but in reverse).  I suppose there are stations on the Red Line in the far north reaches of Chicago that are even worse in terms of the platforms themselves being cramped and dangerous, though in the downtown stations, the staircases are wider.  However, it is true that Chicago is stuck with narrow, unique gauge trains (which are thus considerably more expensive to purchase) on its transit system.  Once you are on the trains, the Toronto system is better than Chicago's.

I remain convinced that the amalgamation was a huge mistake, in the sense that neither the urban nor suburban residents really get their preferred mix of taxes and services, though in general the suburbanites get to outvote the urban residents.  That's certainly not what most progressive proponents of amalgamation have in mind, and it is usually progressives who push for these types of arrangements, though occasionally business-types urge it in the name of efficiency in service delivery.

But Toronto has been living up to its reputation as an arts hub.  The theatre scene is so much better than Vancouver's it is hardly worth mentioning (same thing with AGO versus VAG).  While it is still somewhat behind Chicago, I do find myself in the familiar situation of opening the paper and seeing more theatre openings than I can possibly attend, many at quite reasonable prices.  What Toronto has that Chicago really doesn't have, is the Shaw and Stratford summer festivals, a bit out of town granted, but still a concentration of classical performances with some contemporary theatre sprinkled in that is just really hard to beat.  Last night I saw Sextet at Tarragon, pushed by some glowing reviews.  It was fun, though derivative of The Big Chill.  In a strange way, it gives me a bit more confidence to keep working on The Study Group, in the sense that a perfectly enjoyable piece of theatre can be constructed where the conflict is low-key.  I mean there has to be at least some conflict between characters to move things along -- if everyone wants the same goal and shares the same approach to obtaining it, how boring that would be.  It wouldn't even make for an interesting documentary.  The set up of the play is that this sextet on tour has managed to get trapped in a motel by an on-coming blizzard* and all kinds of secrets come out and many lies are unraveled.  It is just a bit heavy-handed in that the leader of the sextet decides to substitute Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht for the Schubert Quintet, as the storyline (a married women pregnant with another man's child) hits so close to home to his own situation.  But having made this artistic choice, the playwright milks the jokes about Schoenberg and serialism.  Who knew this could be so funny?  Here's a non-ironic performance of Verklarte Nacht as originally composed for string sextet.  The play was well acted, and the characters had pretty distinctive voices, though as the expense of making a few of them almost cartoonishly dim or twee.  (I find it is very hard to have voices distinct from each other and still be normal personalities.)  It definitely makes me a bit more inclined to get a 3 play subscription to Tarragon for the rest of their season, so that's something I'll consider fairly soon.

For a totally different experience, next week I have (cheap) tickets to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf which is almost nothing but expressed conflict between characters. I haven't seen this in ages, and I guess I wouldn't say I am looking forward to it, but I am curious how well they do it. I am trying to make the rounds of the small companies in Toronto just to see what they are up to.  I doubt I have the time to get on a company board, but I might see about getting a bit more involved with a smaller company.  It would be nice to put some roots down in Toronto, though maybe I need to wait until I know where I am actually living first!

I don't have any real regrets about the move here, other than if I had actually been possible, I should have just stuck around in the mid 1990s and I probably could have bought a nice house (or at least a semi-) after I had straightened out my employment prospects.  Of course, the truth is that without going on to Northwestern, I wouldn't have had any decent employment prospects.  My life would have been just as irregular and insecure as the protagonist of my novel.

* Actually, I was caught on a school athletic trip in a blizzard and 10 or more school teams had to camp out in the school gym where we were supposed to compete.  Assuming I ever do wrap up the first novel, that anecdote would supposedly find its way into the sequel.  I guess it is just a nice white lie I tell myself, just like I will at some point get back in shape.  I am on a path that just doesn't offer up enough free time to do either.  That said, I am starting to at least consider doing more winter biking, but I need some special winter biking gear.

No More Santa and Other Stories

I can't actually recall believing in Santa, though I may have at one point.  I was a pretty skeptical kid from about 3rd grade on.  Our son was basically willing to go along with the story after he found out (around age 8) for the sake of his sister.  My daughter started questioning seriously a few weeks ago.  It started with the tooth fairy -- why is her handwriting just like yours?  Then she found a tooth in a drawer.  I guess there was still some lingering faith, but she decided the tooth fairy wasn't real after a week.  Then she started questioning Santa.  Right around her 8th birthday, she put us on the spot.  And while we said we were just helpers and such, eventually when your children ask you point blank about something, you really shouldn't lie.

As in all things, there is now a cottage industry in psychologists who will either support the Santa story as an innocent white lie that allows children to learn things on their own and distinguish truth from fiction, as well as those who see the world more black and white and feel one should never mislead children.  My daughter is a bit angry that we tricked her and says she won't tell her children there is a Santa Claus.  I said that is her right, but she might feel differently when she is older.  I doubt there has been any permanent damage, but we'll see.  My wife wishes there had been one more Christmas with Santa.  I think it's good she figured it out, though I wish she wasn't upset about it.

Anyway, I have pretty much all the gifts for my son, but only one thing for my daughter (though I have stocking stuffers for each).  I am not really looking forward to dealing with holiday shopping, so I had better figure out what to get her and do it in the next two weeks.

Generally, I feel out of sorts.  I have more or less caught up with work, and it was kind of strange not feeling quite so obligated to be up all hours of the day.  Of course, there is work that I could have or should have done, and I am extremely tempted to just take one day this week or next and sleep in.  But I don't think that will be today.  I spent quite a bit of time getting caught up on reading.  I should be 75% through my list of Russian authors by the end of the week, though then I will take a one-book detour into Canadian lit.  There's a pretty good chance that I will wrap up this Russian trek by mid-January.  While it has been quite rewarding, I am a bit exhausted.  It really did feel like graduate level work, though no final exam.  I suspect I am ready for my next project, which will be a couple of academic papers (on car sharing services though not Uber, which is basically just an unregulated taxi service, which is different) and the creative writing.  I think I do need to carve out an hour each evening to write or nothing will get done.  I've already used Leechblock on a couple of other websites, and possibly I need to apply it to my own blog...

Edit: So there have already been some spin-off consequences.  We were at a holiday breakfast at a local community centre (extremely empty compared to the ones in Vancouver, almost depressingly so), and my daughter didn't want to bother sitting on Santa's lap. 

The loneliest Santa?

I suppose there is not much point in trying to track down the Santa train on the TTC.  Now if we were in Chicago, I think we'd still go look for the CTA Santa train as riding it is such a cool experience -- it is clean and smells nice and elves ride inside and hand out candy canes and they even play holiday jingles inside the cars.  I don't think the TTC goes to such lengths, but I could be wrong.  Anyway, maybe in another year or two, she will "forgive us," and we can return to the simple joys of seeking out Santa during the holidays.

Recent ups and downs

I have been really out of sorts since Thurs.*  Maybe part of that was having to work far harder and longer than I expected on Wed. (and not having U.S. Thanksgiving off!) but still only slightly chipping away at the mountain of work I have before me.  (Indeed, I'll see if I can be briefer than usual, as I have a few work obligations to get to tonight.) Given that I have a very pronounced tendency to emphasize the negative, I'll also add some counter-balance at various points as I go into the last four or five days.

It started off fairly badly on Thurs.  I left work early to go find the bus terminal for Greyhound/Megabus to pick up my father-in-law.  It turns out that the station still has lockers, which kind of floored me.  I have bus lockers play a small role in a short play I wrote, but I didn't imagine I would see them still in use.  (Even here, you couldn't just stick something in them for months on end -- only overnight.  I think ultimately I had to switch this over to a bank deposit box, though I can't recall at the moment.)

Since so few people stick around after the bus pulls in, they closed down the arrivals area 4 years ago.**  But Greyhound has no way to track the actual arrival time, and the drivers don't even check in, so they couldn't even tell me for certain whether the bus from Detroit had arrived!  I find that simply incredible.  I didn't ask about Megabus, but I suspect they have a bit more data on their buses and drivers.  I think Greyhound does in the States as well, so I am just absolutely baffled by this.  Anyway, after 2 or 3 periodic passes through the departure area, I went outside to wait for the bus.  As you might imagine, it was cold.  And I was not very happy about all this.  In fact, it was so cold, I only could bear to do a bit of reading (the departure lounge was just too far from the arrivals area, given that there was no good information on buses actually arriving, so I had to wait outside).  Ultimately, the bus pulled in about 90 minutes late, mostly due to very inefficient border crossing inspections (a hand-search of all luggage of every passenger!) and getting slowed down by a Thanksgiving Day parade in Detroit!

After I got my father-in-law home and settled and we had dinner, I tried to watch Nebraska (for the second time!).  This time I got about 1/3 of the way through and just felt like I was slumming it, and I stopped.  I'll have more to say on this later.  But it was a bit of a minor disappointment.  As far as I can tell, some of the stuff that was supposed to "couriered" over here didn't make it for some reason, and my daughter hates the swim cap that did make it over.  So that was more than a little frustrating.

Friday was another long day at work and I got home quite late.  I had mostly finished up the Johnston translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is ok, though from my brief perusal, I like Falen's better.  The truth is, it is such a common plot, that most of the artistry comes from the poetry, which of course is impossible to translate correctly.  I'll have a bit to say about the duel that is so central to the plot in another post (though I am trying to finish up reading Chekhov's The Duel first).  On the other hand, I've been quite taken by Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, and I am nearly done reading through those.  So I guess that has been a positive development.  (While Herzen's My Past and Thoughts was interesting, I think it was way oversold by Isaiah Berlin and my expectations were just too high, whereas Turgenev is meeting and occasionally surpassing my expectations.  What has been paying off to some degree is having a much better grounding in the whole milieu that Turgenev was writing from, and I am sure this will deepen my reading of Fathers and Sons considerably.)  Another positive is that the landlord finally came by and installed the railing to the basement.

Sat. we had a look at a 3 bedroom house just north of Pape Elementary School.  It really wasn't as nice as I hoped and I thought the asking price was on the high side.  Then I found out that this was a seller who was trying to start a bidding war and definitely expected to sell over asking (this is a technique that I despise that fortunately only seems to have taken root (in the U.S.) in New York and San Francisco).  While I have known intellectually that it is going to be tough to find a place to buy in this neighbourhood, or ideally a bit further north in Riverdale proper, it's now starting to sink in.  Of course, I have more resources than many, so we'll probably find something eventually, but it will be more than I want to pay, for certain.  That (and a general lack of sleep) are probably the main sources of my discontent this weekend.

Well, there was another major issue and that is Bell went out around noon on Sat. and remained out until 5 pm Sunday.  Some box outside the house blew out.  This meant no phone, tv or internet for two days, and of course my work requires far more contact than that.  I went back to the library on Sat. in order to use their wireless.  As I was heading home, a bus was pulling up and I decided I might as well go downtown to work, so I did that for 3 or so hours.  I ended up staying so close to 7 that I decided to swing by the City Hall to see them light the tree.  I hadn't expected so many people.  It was quite unpleasant actually, and then I was sort of trapped on the upper level.  They took forever to light the tree -- 7:30, when 7:15 would have been far more reasonable.  Then it was a huge problem getting out and when the police turned up for crowd control they actually made it considerably worse.  It literally took another 30 minutes to get down the stairs and across the street to catch the streetcar.  I was not at all impressed with the way the city handles crowd control, and I will avoid that place in the future for anything involving a concert or fireworks.  I'm sure that it was made worse by them still not being done with the construction at Nathan Phillips Square.  I was pretty starved by the time I finally made it home. 

In general, I stayed up too late on Sat., which lead to the other disappointment of the weekend. I had planned to leave close to 8 am on Sunday to get to Young People's Theatre to see about the discounted tickets for James and the Giant Peach.  Ultimately, I left at 8:40 or so, and didn't arrive until 9:15.  There was a long line that moved extremely slowly.  I guess there were 10-15 people ahead of me when they said all the tickets were gone.  I was majorly bummed.  It felt like such a scene from a Charlie Brown movie, and had I left on time I would have had those tickets.  Fortunately, I had told my kids that they were only going if I could get the tickets (and they were just as happy to spend more time with their granddad).  I can look into getting the discount tickets later in the month, though there are certainly no guarantees there will be any available.  That actually reminds me that I have to look into getting my daughter into swimming classes.  I think registration starts Dec. 6, so I have just a bit more time.

I went to Eaton Centre and was kind of disappointed in the various sales.  I even thought the sleds at Canadian Tire were not very good quality, so I might as well just get something just as cheap from Walmart where I don't have to haul it so far home.  (I guess one positive is that I am basically done shopping for b-day stuff for my daughter and Xmas presents for my son.)  The clothes shopping did not go well at all, however. I was just astounded that 70% or so of the dress shirts at Hudson Bay Company were fitted or slim cut, when I hardly see young men wearing dress shirts at all.  I found one shirt in my size.  In general, shopping for clothes is extremely dispiriting for me, and then I start getting frustrating that my current job/lifestyle is not supportive of getting in shape at all...

I went home and took a nap (in frustration) after finding that the cable and internet were still out.  Around 3 I woke up and thought I would try Sears over on Coxwell.  Well, it turns out that it was just a mail drop place -- in other words you could have stuff sent there from Sears.ca but there was no store at all.  This was just too much.  I went home and found that the cable and internet was back on, and tried to get caught up.  As frustrating as the whole outage has been, I will admit that it was much, much worse trying to get service restored in the UK and even in Vancouver, where Shaw was pretty useless.  I have to admit that when I see it all written out, it strikes me that it was a pretty lousy weekend with far more downs than ups.  I probably should cut this off here.  The next posts will be far more focused on Turgenev and other Russians, and that should be a bit more uplifting.

Edit:
There was actually a fairly innocuous comment here that turned out to be nothing but spam.  I'll try to be better about monitoring that in future.  In response to the query about other recommended reading, I wrote: Do you mean the duel in Russian literature, or something else? In addition to Eugene Onegin and Chekhov's The Duel, duels feature prominently in Dostoevsky's Demons and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It is also somewhat notable when a duel does not take place in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I should be able to post on this next week or so.

* Actually my left ear has been bothering me for over a week.  It gets a bit better, then seems to close up again.  I definitely will have to have it looked at pretty soon.  That is a major reason for my being out of sorts as well.

** This is just one of several examples of how Toronto is just a bit shabbier than I remembered.  Conditions at UT's Robarts Library are another.  I think Toronto is definitely constrained by a fierce anti-tax movement spearheaded by its outer (essentially suburban) wards.  While Toronto might not be considered such a global city had it never been amalgamated, I think on the whole it would have been better not to have been forced together, particularly since Mike Harris intentionally drew the boundaries in a perverse way to add far more suburban residents into the city than one would ever have done were it not for political payback.