Missing work

I find perhaps the single most demoralizing thing having to repeat work that was already done.  (This slightly edges out having my advice ignored, particularly when it leads to avoidable problems (and more work for me) down the road.)  Fortunately, this doesn't happen all that often, but not long after our move here, I lost an external hard drive that wasn't that well backed up, and in fairly short order after that, a desktop computer died, as well as a laptop.  All these failures in short order led to a significant loss of files.  I actually think a few files were on a USB drive and I'll keep my eyes open for that.  I am finally ready to start digging around in the basement to see if I can find the data DVDs from around that time.  But in a lot of cases, I will simply have to try to check the various books out of the library again and take the notes all over again.

There were quite a few notes on Jean Anouilh's (in French and English), but I will hold off the longest on those, since I am the most convinced I backed this up somewhere else.

Of the other items, there was Gillespie's history of the Twin Towers.
Gottdiener's The City and the Sign
David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity
Elizabeth Smart By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Zach Mason Lost Books of the Odyssey
Turgenev A Month in the Country
A couple of monographs on Mark Tobey (while the library here has a slightly different selection than Vancouver, they actually have quite a few for an artist from the Pacific Northwest)
The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (this cannot be found in either the Toronto Public Library or Robarts, but I shall attempt ILL since it is in the Vancouver library system -- apparently the big fees only accrue for books borrowed from US libraries).

While extremely annoying, this is not the end of the world, particularly given just how bad the failures were.  (I did lose many shows recorded off BBC Radio 3, but those were gone forever and it didn't really bother me as much as I thought when I lost them.)  I'll cross these off the list after I feel I have sufficiently recreated my notes from the first time around.  I'll definitely feel better after I have gotten through the list, particularly if I am able to get that Flora book through ILL.

This actually reminds me of another catastrophic failure I had back in college when I lost all my creative writing (probably another computer died on me, but I can't remember the details).  However, I was working with a poetry professor who actually had all my submitted poems from two semesters in a big folder, and I was able to borrow that from him and make copies.  That was an interesting time when people were moving from analog modes (writing in notebooks and then typing into a computer and printing everything out on dot matrix printers) to the early floppy disks that were pretty vulnerable to going bad.  Today's USBs and portable hard drives are a lot more durable, but not infallible.  I guess there is something to be said for putting everything up in the cloud, but I'm not quite ready yet.  I'm generally better about backing things up than I used to be, particularly anything that I consider creative writing.

Colder than Yellowknife

Yesterday Toronto (and Peterborough) was colder than Yellowknife.  That is the case this morning as well, though by the afternoon Toronto should warm up a bit to -10 C or so.  Not sure about Peterborough or Ottawa, though Ottawa is almost always colder than Toronto.  Later in the week, Yellowknife returns to its normal bone-chilling cold and Toronto is relatively balmy, even breaking 0 C a couple of times.  I guess last February was colder, but I don't recall any days that felt just as intensely cold as yesterday.  (I've probably just blocked them from memory, however.)

I don't think I actually reviewed Robert Kroetch's The Snowbird Poems, but I am starting to understand the appeal of heading south for the winter, which is definitely something a lot of older Canadians do.  While this won't be a proper review, I will quote a few sections from Kroetch's Excerpts from the Real World:
29/9/85
Caribou, for instance, know how to paw with their hoofs through snow and find silken clumps of lichen.  All the flights to Hawaii, from now until Ash Wednesday, are booked by polar bears.  Don't forget to bring your guitar.

30/9/85
The streets of Winnipeg, in winter, become intention.  One learns to breathe cold iron.  Testicles migrate, along with snow geese and other birds of questionable courage, to bayous and estuaries.  Nipples eat frozen red berries off the mountain ask and various bushes.  This is a prophecy.

Anyway, it's darn cold out there. 

I don't really want to go out, but I have to get more groceries (especially as the stores will be closed for Family Day tomorrow.)  I may run out to see a play this afternoon, since it received a favorable review from Mooney's.  While the set-up is pretty similar to Seminar (the Mirvish production that I skipped last fall), my understanding is that the big-shot creative writing professor never appears on-stage in this production, so we just see all the politicking that happens backstage as it were.  That actually sounds a bit intriguing, though I may be conflating Dalton and Company with Bartleby and Co. (a novel by Enrique Vila-Matas).  And while Bartleby was never entirely off-screen, he is sort of an absence at the center of Melville's story.  (I have to admit that I have not read Vila-Matas's book, though it looks intriguing, and I have put it on hold at the library.  I was tipped off from the comments on this story about a civil servant who was paid for many years without turning up for once even once.)  I think many of us dream of being Bartleby's, simply refusing to do that which we wish not to do.

I'm actually a bit upset over not being able to track down some computer files I wanted to work on today.  I think an awful lot of stuff was lost between March and August 2014 when one of my portable hard drives was damaged beyond repair.  Probably some of this was burned to backup DVD, but I don't have any easy way to sort through this.  I guess I really do need to finally go downstairs and dig through those boxes of data DVDs and put them in some kind of order.  I am obviously really dreading this.

Well, before I do that (or go out into the cold for groceries), I'll give a quick breakdown of the trip.  I got a bit of a late start, since it took longer than I hoped to get the car warmed up.  It was quite a pain, having to switch between keeping the inside of the car warmer vs. blowing air onto the windshield to keep it from fogging up.  It wasn't until I was most of the way down the Don Valley Parkway to the 401 that it got remotely comfortable to drive.

I was a bit worried about missing the turn-off, but in the end it wasn't all that bad.  I made pretty decent time and ended up coming into Peterborough at about 11:15.  I pulled into the big parking lot near the art gallery.  It was free parking all weekend, which was very welcome.  I did have some change but didn't really want to have to take off my gloves to feed the meter.  I did bring my bag of driving supplies inside, as I didn't want it to freeze.

The gallery was nice, but definitely on the small side.  There was basically one big room at the bottom, and then some artwork from the permanent collection hung on the walls of the ramps to and from the main floor.

They actually had three prints by Andy Warhol, including this one of Wayne Gretzky.  I had no idea Warhol even knew about hockey, but anyway, how quintessentially Canadian (and garishly 80s)...

Andy Warhol, Wayne Gretzky, 1984

I also thought these two were interesting.

Kenneth Lochhead, Germination, 1961

Moira Clark, Salon, 1982

While it is perhaps a bit of a stretch, I saw just a bit of Utermohler's messing about with perspective in Salon.  It was a quick visit (maybe 20 minutes). There is no question that there is more to see (about 4 times as much) at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.  I also took a quick look at the gift shop and came close to picking up a print by Lisa Martini-Dunk but I truly don't have anywhere I could hang it in the house, so I guess my art collecting days are over.

I then had a very bad moment with the car when I thought it wouldn't start, but apparently with these new cars, you press the brake and turn the ignition (rather than giving it some gas).  I find this very counter-intuitive.  Anyway, I moseyed on down a bit in downtown Peterborough and parked fairly close to Market Square.  I grabbed my ticket and a very quick lunch, then went in to see Les Belles Soeurs.  At the box office, they said it would be done close to 2:30, so I started pondering making a short trip to Oshawa on the way back.

The performance was well done, though one does have to wonder about the wisdom of getting all the neighborhood women to help out with pasting in the million stamps, particularly when the winner wouldn't stop gloating about all the nice things she would buy with the stamps.  It predictably ends in disaster.  (I've heard that the musical version features a someone more uplifting ending, which seems like such a bizarre and unworthy rewriting of the script.  I still can't believe that Tremblay agreed to this, but perhaps the money was too good to pass up.)  The main plot is hardly the point as we explore these women and their complaints about family and their unthinking adherence to a particularly narrow and misogynistic version of Catholicism.  About the only thing they have going for them, is that they love playing bingo, and the showstopper was when they all stop what they are doing and do a routine about how they love bingo.  Several of them appear to be on the edge of orgasm (even the old woman in the wheelchair).  I thought it was a particularly nice touch that the uptight sister reveals her red stockings, which are hidden throughout the show, in what is a clear parallel to her fallen sister's flame red stockings.  You can see the fallen sister on the far right in the second picture below, though the red stockings on the repressed sister cannot be seen.  This one scene could well have been turned into a full-on dance routine, but the rest was generally more realistic and downbeat.

It was worth the trip.  I hope that the cast considered it worth doing, after it was cut back from two weekends to one (and without even a Sunday matinee).  I'll try to catch it again if a production comes through Toronto.  While I still think Albertine in Five Times is a slightly more original play, Les Belles Soeurs was very good.

However, the play ended at 3:15, not 2:30, so Oshawa was definitely out.  I also had trouble getting out of Peterborough, as the signage was fairly poor.  To say nothing of almost freezing my hands off filling up the car.  Driving back wasn't too bad after that, but I just don't have the stamina I used to for long drives.  If I go out to Brock in a couple of weeks for another play, I am definitely taking the bus.

So that was my trip.  I guess I have no more excuses, so I have to head out now...

Emmanuel Bove in French and English

I can never tell exactly why certain authors grab a hold of my attention.  Lately I have gotten quite interested in Emmanuel Bove.  He was actually quite a prolific writer, particularly given the challenging circumstances (he fled Occupied France for Algeria in 1942 but returned in 1944 after the Germans were repelled from France).  He died in Paris in 1945.  My general impression is that he, like Joseph Roth, was somewhat dissolute and would never have lived to a ripe old age, but that the stresses of war as well as the difficult economic times between the wars accelerated his decline.  There is a good overview of his career here (this is also the introduction to the recent NYRB volume, Henri Duchemin and His Shadows).

Perhaps what fascinates me the most is that he was somewhat of a literary darling, but he became fairly obscure by the 1960s.  Bove is slowly being rediscovered, but only a small number of his books are available in English.  I personally consider him the "real deal," since he lived through all the troubles that Patrick Modiano obsessively relates second-hand.  He is known for a somewhat flat, direct style, and he was generally preoccupied with quasi-indigent men who had aspirations to move out of the working class.  I don't know if others see it, but his middle style reminds me of Sartre's existential fiction.  Bove's last three completed novels have the additional frisson that comes from refugees unsure of whom they can trust during war time.  It is perhaps not surprising that these three are all available in English translation (Quicksand, Night Departure and No Place), though generally Le Piège (Quicksand) is considered the best of the three.

It appears that three novels from the 1930s were published posthumously, and I have kept them a bit separate from the others in the bibliography below.  Curiously, two of them have been translated into English.  Again, what makes Bove a bit different from other French authors of his stature is that several of his major works have not been translated into English, including La Coalition, Coeurs et Visages and arguably Le Pressentiment.  I've started collecting a few of his books in French and will see how far I can get with them.  It does help that he doesn't have a very elaborate style.

Anyway, there is an incredibly detailed bibliography here, which seems to have everything covered aside from two relatively recent English translations.  To avoid confusion, I will note if there is an English translation by an "E," so O or R in the first list will refer only to the French version of Bove's works, whereas a note in the second list will refer to the English version.

There is no question that tracking down Bove's stories will be the hardest (if I get completely obsessed and try to read them all).  It is actually fairly difficult to find out much information about the French volumes republished recently.  My understanding is that it is only the 1939 edition of La Dernière Nuit that contains the extra stories and that the more recent printing omits them.  (If I understand this correctly, La Dernière Nuit is the same work as Un suicide, but that Histoire d'un suicide is a second work (sometimes titled La Coalition).) However, it appears that the recent printing of Monsieur Thorpe contains the stories that were included with La Dernière Nuit, as well as Petits Contes, so I may try to pick that up.

It definitely seems more difficult (and expensive) to do inter-library loan in Toronto, though a lot of this has to do with the increased postage costs across the border.  I currently gave up on getting the recent translation of A Raskolnikoff and will just read (or attempt to read) the French version at Robarts.  I also decided to order a copy of A Man Who Knows and will donate that to Robarts at some point in the late summer or fall.  I'm waiting to see if SUNY-Buffalo will send over their version of The Stepson or if they charge an arm and a leg for it, in which case I'll eventually order it myself.*  If that does come through, however, it seems that they have the 1939 version of La Dernière Nuit, and I'd see if that can be requested.  Otherwise, I'll just buy the newer edition of Monsieur Thorpe.  Interestingly, at least a few of these titles are now available on the Kindle, so I'll probably try that for one or two titles.

It is curious that Flammarion published a book called Romans in 1999, which covered 9 of Bove's major works (some technically stories and not novels), comprising just under half of his fiction.  It would be ideal if at some point they put out Romans 2 to cover the rest, though I am certainly not holding my breath.  Anyway, just writing things out this way helps relieve the pressure, and after reading a few more of his novels in translation and attempting one or two in the original, I can probably let go of this particular obsession.  (As it happens, I have been falling out of step with Bove and his fairly unpleasant narrators, and I didn't enjoy A Singular Man or A Man Who Knows at all, so I think I have hit the end of the road with Bove.)

Bove in French:
EO     Mes amis, roman, 1924.
EO     Armand, roman,1927.
O     Bécon-les-Bruyères, nouvelle, 1927.
O     Un soir chez Blutel, roman, 1927.
UT.     Un père et sa fille, nouvelle, 1928.
O     La Coalition, roman, 1928.
     La Mort de Dinah, roman, 1928.
O     Coeurs et Visages, roman, 1928.
EO     Henri Duchemin et ses ombres, 1928 (comprend: "le Crime d'une nuit", "Un autre ami", "Visite d'un soir", "Ce que j'ai vu", "l'Histoire d'un fou", "le Retour de l'enfant", "Est-ce un mensonge?").
O     L'Amour de Pierre Neuhart, roman, 1928.
UT.     Une Fugue, nouvelle, 1929.
UT     Petits Contes, 1929 (comprend: "l'Enfant surpris", "Une journée à Chantilly", "Conversation", "le Trac", "les Pâques de Konazi").
UT     Monsieur Thorpe, nouvelle, 1929.
     Une illusion, nouvelle, 1929.
     Un malentendu, nouvelle, 1930.
EO     Journal écrit en hiver, roman, 1931.
EUT.     Un Raskolnikoff, nouvelle, 1932.
     Un célibataire, roman, 1932.
     La Toque de Breitschwanz, roman policier (sous le pseudonyme de Pierre Dugast), 1933.
     Le Meurtre de Suzy Pommier, roman policier, 1933.
E     Le Beau-Fils, roman, 1934.
     Histoire d'un suicide (la Coalition), roman, 1934.
O     Le Pressentiment, roman, 1935.
     L'Impossible Amour, roman, 1935.
     Adieu Fombonne, roman, 1937.
     La Dernière Nuit (comprend: la Dernière Nuit (autre titre d'Un suicide) et les nouvelles intitulées: "une illusion", "Rencontre", "le Retour", "la Garantie", "le Secret", "Elle est morte"), Gallimard, 1939.
EO     Le Piège, roman, 1945.
     Une Offense, nouvelle, 1945.
EUT     Départ dans la nuit, roman, 1945.
EUT     Non-Lieu, roman, 1946 (édition posthume).
Other posthumous works
EUT     Un homme qui savait, roman, 1986.
EUT     Mémoires d'un homme singulier, roman, 1987.
     Un caractère de femme, roman, 1999.

Bove in English:
R    My Friends (Mes amis)
R    Armand
UT   A Winter's Journal (Journal écrit en hiver)
O   The Stepson (Le Beau-Fils)
O   Quicksand (Le Piège)
O   Night Departure; and No Place (Départ dans la nuit/Non-Lieu)
R   A Singular Man (Mémoires d'un homme singulier)
R   A Man Who Knows (Un homme qui savait) (sadly not good at all)
      A Raskolnikoff
R   Henri Duchemin and His Shadows (Henri Duchemin et ses ombres)

* Just after I finished typing this, I found that there was an inexpensive copy of The Stepson from Betterworld Book (with only moderately expensive shipping to Canada).  So I jumped on that, and after I read it, I will donate it to Robarts.  I'll still leave the ILL request in place, however, just to see what happens.

Road tripping (to Peterborough)

I certainly could have picked a better weekend to travel out to Peterborough, but I guess as long as I stay in the car, I should be ok.  I am off to see Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs tomorrow.  There is a matinee and an evening performance left.  Tickets are available here.  I was going to go anyway, but this review was very positive, so I am really looking forward to it now.  (Well, maybe not the cold or the tedium of driving, but it shouldn't be too bad.)

If the trip goes well, I shall go ahead and get a ticket to the play down at Brock in St. Catherines.  This time I can take the bus and get some reading done. I probably should have gotten my Megabus ticket already, but I don't think the fare will have jumped up too much on me.  This is very much the off-season for travelling.

Doing the (Gravity) Wave

My understanding of higher-order physics is very limited, but the news that the LIGO experiment has uncovered evidence of gravity waves emanating from two black holes is quite exciting.  I do wonder how often such an event will occur in order for the scientists to really use this to peer back into the first moments of the Big Bang, according to the ever-excitable Stephen Hawking.  On the other hand, if there truly are massive black holes at the centre of all galaxies, then it might not be such a rare event after all.  While this has made the news everywhere, this article goes a bit deeper into the mechanics of the experiment -- and has some droll comments BTL.

Congratulations to all, and particularly to Albert Einstein whose theories have been borne out (yet again).

Immigration in literature

This is one of those huge topics that can easily derail a post, but I've been reading quite a few (fictional) books on the topic of immigration and/or the status of new immigrants to the U.S. or Canada.  As it happens, nearly all of these have been set post 1965, around the time immigration to the U.S. and Canada opened back up after several decades of being quite exclusionary, particularly to non-Europeans.  However, in the past I had read more about new immigrants closer to the turn of the century and I've added Transit by Anna Seghers to my TBR pile (true towards the very bottom), and this tackles the issue of Jewish emigrants trying to leave Germany and Europe more broadly in the run-up to and during WWII.  (It sounds like I should pair it with W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants.)  Thus, the stakes are raised in a way that wasn't the case for the novels covering immigration and immigrants around the turn-of-the-20th-century.  One could certainly claim that the Irish potato famine, which launched huge waves of Irish immigration was a life or death struggle, but it still wasn't the same as hiding away from the Nazis to avoid concentration camps.  Thus, Segher's Transit has more in common with the last novels that Bove wrote or Némirovsky's Suite Française.  As it happens, neither the U.S. nor Canada was particularly open to accepting Jewish refugees, and some historians have made a strong case that Canada was in fact the worst First World nation (not part of the Axis) in terms of accepting Jewish refugees.  I will circle back to this mismatch between the way Canada is viewed today and its historical legacy.

Obviously, I haven't read Transit yet, but it certainly seems relevant today when Europe appears to be on the brink of a crisis (or at least about to lose one of the defining features of European unity -- the freedom of movement within the Schengen Area) due to the pressure of immigration from Syria and other failed states in the Middle East and North Africa. These are confusing times, and it will be interesting to see how Europe reacts to this intermingling. I have to say historical trends are not particularly encouraging. I would not say either the U.S. or Canada ever thoroughly integrated its recent (i.e. post 1965) migrant communities, but North America has done a much better job than France with its immigrants from North Africa (many living in the slums outside Paris and perhaps slightly better integrated in Marseilles) to say nothing of Germany with its generations of Turkish immigrants who still are not eligible for full citizenship.*

I'm going to hive off all the novels set after 1965 into a second post.  Even that post may spawn one or two secondary posts, simply because the topic is still so huge.

There seem to be two general approaches to dealing with immigration in literature.  Either one follows a special character who is highly self-aware and is able to enter a new country (legally or illegally) and who then comments upon what he or she finds, or one writes as a "native" observing the huddled masses in the city.  The first stance is quite common among writers from South Asian diasporic writers, such as Mukherjee, Lahiri and Rushdie, though since all their novels fall after 1965, I will hold off discussing them until the folluw-up post.  The talented observer is also to be found in the writings of American Black authors who went into self-imposed exile into Europe either during the 1930s or after WWII, and this would include James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Richard Wright's The Outsider, and John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am.

The outsider looking in at the masses is basically the whole point of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and there are also relatively sympathetic portrayals of immigrant communities throughout John Steinbeck's work and John Dos Passos's early novels.  I know that William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes deals with immigrants interacting with most established Americans, but I haven't read it.  One day...

Of course, I'm quite sure there are a number of urban novels I have forgotten where the narrator is hostile to the teaming masses, but those haven't really stood the test of time. I've heard that Henry Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers is fairly ambivalent towards the immigrants of Chicago, but I have not read it.  I will try to one day.  I also have not gotten around to the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell, which is about life in Chicago in a neighborhood full of Irish immigrants.

This leads naturally to a third option, though certainly not as common, where the author is writing from the middle of the immigrant community.  At least in the U.S., this was usually tied in with proletarian literature, since it was generally only left-wing intellectuals (and presses) that would take on such novels.  So Mike Gold's Jews without Money and Henry Roth's Call It Spring are both written from authors in the midst of New York Jewish communities (before Jews became "white" in roughly the 1950s).  I have to admit, I seem to have lost my class notes from my course on Proletarian Novels taught by Alan Wald at UMichigan, but there were 3 or 4 other good examples.  If they turn up, I will add a few more.

In this same vein, but not as explicitly leftist, there is a whole series of novels on Swedish farmers moving to America and trying to make a go of it.  This is the basic plot of Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants.  This is certainly a really important part of the American melting pot (the Nordic folks that settled the upper Midwest and Plains States and to some extent the Canadian Prairie), which is generally not written about all that much.  I have not read it (and the following 3 books), and it is not on my TBR list at the moment, but I may add it some day.  I have to admit that my interests just lie so much closer to urban literature that reading about farmsteaders is not really my cup of tea.  I would probably tackle Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth first to see if I wanted to read more along these lines.

I'm getting further and further from books I've actually read and about which I can say anything meaningful.  I will close out this post with one of the first major post-colonial writers, George Lamming.  Lamming generally strikes me as someone who felt he was too clever and special to stay behind in his native Barbados and he took advantage of the implied promise of the Empire, i.e. that clever souls could move to London at the heart of the Empire.  And so he did.  And he found that the promise was a half-hearted one at best.  He was never to feel completely accepted in England, and yet, as far I can tell, he never left.  He definitely feels ambivalence about his adopted country, and in many ways strikes me as a forerunner of V.S. Naipaul.  (Indeed, there are a few articles and a monograph drawing out connections between the two.)  This is a bit different from Bharati Mukherjee who only has positive things to say about the U.S. at least in relation to Canada...  I remember thinking quite highly of Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, which I thought just a bit reminiscent of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set in Barbados (my memory may be failing me, however!).  I wasn't as taken with The Emigrants, which moves the setting to England and follows the tribulations of Caribbean immigrants.  Perhaps I would like it more now, and I am considering adding it to the tail end of my long reading list, and then I might follow up with the essays in The Pleasures of Exile and On the Canvas of the World.  As it happens, the Toronto Library does have all these books.†  It isn't a particularly high priority, but it's something I will definitely consider.  I would recommend reading In the Castle of My Skin, even if one doesn't want to tackle all the other books.  To me it gives some insights into why a talented person would choose to emigrate to another country, which obviously has some resonance for my situation, though I would not consider myself an exile from the U.S. (at least just yet -- still waiting to see what happens with the 2016 election but things don't look good, particularly with Congress which is where the real problems lie).



* To concentrate all the particularly controversial material, I will confine the rest of the commentary down here. I have a fair bit of experience navigating the immigration channels, as I applied for student visa to Canada and then for work visas to the U.K. and now Canada. I would say that in general I think immigration should be loosened, but not that border control should be completely eliminated. I certainly don't agree with groups like "No One is Illegal," who basically do not recognize the ability of states to set immigration policy. Basically all serious studies of immigration have found that higher levels of immigration have positive benefits in the short- and medium- term, and this is particularly the case in countries with low birth rates, like most of Europe and Canada (here are some relevant studies from RAND looking at immigration in California and the UK). That does not mean that there are no downsides to immigration, in particular the downward push on wages (some studies here and here) and the displacement of some lower "castes" even further down the occupational chain (see here and here -- probably behind paywalls unfortunately).  Even the RAND study of immigration in California cautions that the costs of immigration are increasing and starting to shift the balance in favor of more restrictive and certainly more selective immigration policy for it to still benefit the state.  Several scholars have made a strong case that African-Americans would have better life outcomes except for the fact that they were displaced by the new immigrants who quickly took up a better position in the racial hierarchy in the U.S.** What none of these studies has really focused on is whether there is an ideal number of new immigrants to a society, in particular these more homogeneous societies of Northern Europe that simply do not seem to have the ability to integrate the new immigrants into their society. Certainly my impression from the news reports is that there is a ticking time bomb at the heart of these Nordic societies and perhaps Germany as well. I'll leave aside the issue of the "Islamification of Europe" for another day, perhaps.


** I've been reacting fairly negatively to Mukherjee's Darkness for a few reasons, but the primary one is that she keeps dumping on Canada and claiming that the U.S. is/was so much more genuinely open to South Asian immigrants like herself. People might well have been polite in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it was clear that she was not part of the overwhelmingly white society. I can't deny that was her experience, and a bit of digging around into Canadian immigration history does suggest that Canada's immigration laws were actually even more exclusionary than those of the U.S. at least until 1947. Also, Canada has always received only a small fraction of the immigration that the U.S. has done, though it doesn't take as many immigrants to make Canadian cities feel multicultural. I would certainly argue that by the mid 1990s, the situation had reversed and post 9/11, it was better to be a non-white immigrant in Canada than the U.S. Mukherjee might still not agree, of course.  In any case, my take on the racial hierarchy in Canada is a bit more complex. It's not so much that visible minorities became white but that as new groups came in, the older groups did come closer to the centre and became "more Canadian." So for example, when large numbers of Chinese immigrants started arriving by say the late 1980s, South Asian groups were viewed more positively, since they had once been part of the British empire (and India and Pakistan are still Commonwealth countries) but more to the point, the vast majority of Indians and Pakistanis speak very good English (at least those living in Canada). Thus, the Chinese were the new "other," until they moved a bit closer to the centre with the arrival of Muslim immigrants and particularly this current wave of Syrian immigrants. At least the Chinese are Christian, according to those people holding nationalist tendencies. And so it goes. That doesn't mean there are no tensions, and particularly in Vancouver, mainland Chinese are largely blamed for the affordability crisis in their real estate market. I think there is probably some truth to that, but the affordability crisis is more of a symptom of Toronto and Vancouver finally having become world cities.

† However, it only has a reference copy of Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, so I will have to go to Robarts yet again.  (This seems to be the story of my life for delving into serious fiction; fortunately, I can get an alumni card.)  Amazon has seemed to notice that I am taking an interest in immigrant fiction, and has offered up this book on West Indians in London in the 1950s that seems like a most appropriate book to pair with Lamming's The Emigrants.

At loose ends (this weekend)

One of the down sides of being just a bit manic in going out and doing arts and theatre almost every weekend is that when you suddenly have a "down" weekend, it feels strange.  What is even stranger, however, is when you plan on setting aside some time for an event, and then it doesn't come to pass.  I had expected to be driving to Peterborough on Sunday to catch Les Belles Soeurs, and it turns out they are only doing it next weekend, and I will have to go on Sat.  First off, I am a bit concerned that the weather may turn on me (this weekend is chilly but no meaningful snow).  If the forecast is correct, next Saturday will probably still be clear, but it is going to be very, very cold (-13 C), so I am definitely holding off for a bit to be sure I want to go under those conditions.

Anyway, that means that while I have plenty to do this weekend -- work, cooking, getting back to sewing the curtains, it doesn't look like there is any theatre that I want to see.  The Cherry Orchard is just not enough of a draw (and they seem determined not to offer any discounted tickets).  It really does seem that the main theatre critic at The Toronto Star has indeed retired, and I was sort of counting on him to indicate if there was any merit in this production, but I've pretty much decided to skip it.

Salt-Water Moon hasn't opened at Factory Theatre, and I have to say that the way they have decided to rework the play "through an intercultural lens" does not appeal to me.  I have complicated feelings about race-blind casting.  Many (but not all) of the characters in my plays really are written for a performer of a specific race or ethnicity.  That's a bit different from what they are up to here at Factory, where I think of this as somewhere between stunt casting and revising the play (without French's express permission, as he is dead).  If they just change the costumes and leave the lines alone, then how is this meaningful?  These Asian characters would never have been living in Newfoundland right after WWI.  So I just don't find this appealing at all.  I'll check the reviews, but at this point I plan to pass.

I briefly considered Chelsea Hotel over at Theatre Passe Muraille, but I just wasn't blown away by the singing in the video clip, and the tickets are not cheap.  So that's out.

I was hoping to check out the Two-Character Play over at Tarragon or Richard III also at Tarragon this weekend, but neither has opened.

It is odd knowing just how much is coming down the road, but just having to wait.  (I found that the Royal Conservatory has sort of put their season up though it is so vague that you basically just have to trust them that the concerts will be interesting.  I could only tell for certain that they were doing Mendelssohn's Octet and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.  Both chestnuts, but I'll probably go anyway.)

So I think this will be an event-less weekend for once, though as I said, I do have plenty to get done.  If I do have some time left over, I should work on my short story for the contest.