Wall Falls Down

It looks like the Guardian jumped the gun a bit on its various features on the Berlin Wall (technically the 30th anniversary of the wall coming down is tomorrow).  I did like this piece focusing on German writers and their response to the fall of the wall.

I do remember watching the events (on TV) during my junior year of university.  I hadn't really expected the collapse of the Iron Curtain to be nearly as sudden or as far-reaching as it was.  I was correct in that this was hardly the "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it, in his stunningly wrong-headed assessment.

Many, many years later I had the opportunity to visit Berlin on a work trip.  I had to make the obligatory visit to Checkpoint Charlie.

 
I also picked up a very small fragment of the Berlin Wall from the Berlin Wall Museum. 

Obviously, it's possible that it's a fake, but, given it's provenance from the museum, odds are it's the real deal.

I likely won't do a whole lot to memorialize the fall tomorrow, though I am hoping to watch the movie Good Bye Berlin fairly soon, where an East Berlin woman emerges from a coma (after the fall of the wall); her family tries to hide the momentous events from her, to avoid her having a relapse from the shock.  It's supposed to be a good comedy, but I've never gotten through the whole movie.

No Hamlet

I'm sure I am just being an old fuddy-duddy, but I am quite disappointed in the casting of Hamlet at Stratford to the point that I won't go after all.  First off, I can't tell if they are going for a gender-bent Hamlet or just an extremely androgynous one, but either way it doesn't work for me.  Second, I have very strong doubts about the Othello-like vibe when casting Andre Sills as Hamlet's father yet then a white actor as Claudius, his brother.

They are already doing an unconventional take on Hamlet next season (Hamlet-911), so I don't see why they can't do a more traditional Hamlet in the Festival Theatre.  In any case, I won't be going, and I'll just take my son to a different production one of these days.  I guess that is enough ranting for one day.

Edit: I did go and see this, and I didn't like it at all, though at least they weren't playing Hamlet as a female character.  I only just realized that I had heard about this production in 2019, but it was pushed all the way to 2022 due to COVID!

SFYS - Shut Down in November

Well, I hadn't heard anything about the Sing-for-Your-Supper and whether my very tardy piece had been accepted or not, so I decided to go up to Tarragon anyway.  I figured I would leave at intermission if my piece hadn't been taken.  Well, it turns out that the event had been cancelled.  Back at home, my wife managed to find one Facebook posting that said November was cancelled (on fairly short notice I believe), though I still didn't find it in my searching, so there is no question their main Facebook page leaves a lot to be desired (and it wouldn't have been remiss to at least email me and tell me the theatre would be dark).  At any rate, the main person who reads the scripts is moving on (to Ottawa of all places) and is hoping to recruit someone else.  I don't really think I have the time to take that on, and even if I did, then I would no longer be able to have my pieces read at SFYS, so that definitely wouldn't work!  Maybe one of the actors has a bit more time and can pitch in.

In the short term, this means that I will probably pull my piece from consideration, tighten it up a bit more and add the coda.  Just last night I thought of a fairly saucy punchline, though it only works if enough people are in on the joke.  It runs "Just another American Juliette looking for her Canadian Romeo.  Except for the bloody ending, of course.  (Beat.)  I mean unless you're really into that kind of thing."

Almost any phrase can be given sexual connotations, so I think most people (with a moderately dirty mind) would get what she is talking about.  But just to underline the point, I added a definition of "bloody ending" to the Urban Dictionary, and we'll see if it spreads.  It's not my finest moment as a writer, but I thought it was funny enough.

I'll send the piece to Toronto Cold Reads instead, even though I have never had much success there.  Then I'll work on one or two more pieces for the Dec. meeting of SFYS.  One piece is about a man who can be guilted into just about anything, so he ends up with one homeless guy living in his living room and he'll probably have another before the piece ends.  This could be interesting, but I'm not quite sure how dark to go.  The other is a piece, inspired by Pinter's Betrayal, about the unravelling of an affair.  I hope to have both pieces ready in time, though that is more of an aspirational goal, given my recent history.

I very briefly considered entering the Fringe lottery, which closes on Nov 10.  If I won, this would definitely force me to finish the rewrites and extensions of my SF piece about a couple and their two AI units.  But I realized 1) I'm not entirely sure it will work as a full-length piece and 2) I'd like to travel this summer and I don't want to be responsible for whipping a troupe into shape for Fringe.  So I'll pass this year at least.  Maybe the following year I will finally have recovered enough to give it another go.

That's pretty much it.  I've been seeing a lot of good shows, and I'm going to see Trout Stanley at Factory this week (with good reviews so far, so fingers crossed), and I'll try to check out Night Watch most likely next week.  Some info here.  If I do go, it will probably be next week.

Under-the-Weather Weekend

I've been fighting off a cold or something these past two weeks, and I finally gave in on Sat.  (I'm sure it didn't help that I finally ran out of antihistamine tablets.)  I cancelled my plans for the day and mostly slept in.  Now it isn't that I did absolutely nothing on Sat.  I finished a playlet on a student that comes to live with her aunt and uncle to study at UT.  It probably won't get taken for SFYS, since it was appallingly late, and it is a bit too long.  Also, I decided I didn't like the ending, as it was too pat.  I'm going to add a 3-4 page coda that I think will liven it up a bit.  I should be able to get to that today.  I also went and got the groceries in the evening, but otherwise I tried to rest.  I even skipped the gym, so I'm feeling somewhat guilty about that.  Maybe it is just as well that my daughter's glasses didn't come in after all, even though at the time I was quite annoyed.

I'm feeling a bit better today and will try to get through some of my abandoned tasks today.  I probably will make it downtown for a while.  I'll likely take my daughter to Matty Eckler for a short pool session, and then I'll probably hit the gym after that.

One thing that is, mercifully, still on track is the installation of the downstairs bathroom.  It was framed on Thurs., then the drywall went up Friday and then yesterday they started prepping to do the painting and installation of the fixtures.

It looks like it will be a good-sized shower, which is pretty nice, though it will definitely take some getting use to in terms of getting in there, since there is a heating duct that runs right along side of it.  Also, it will be a tight squeeze to access the spare refrigerator, though I think over time we'll come to terms with the space.

The plan is to be finished with the construction on Friday, and I presume they will clean up the inside and outside spaces Friday and Saturday.  It will certainly be nice not having so much junk in the backyard, as it made it very challenging to put out the garbage, and I've pretty much given up on cycling for the time being.  (To be fair, I am so much more gun shy about riding in inclement weather that I had already unofficially stopped biking to work.)

The main issue after that will be to continue clearing out more of the boxes of storage and to figure out to do with essentially 5-6 boxes of books that are very, very low on my reading list.  There's only so much room in my Little Free Library after all... 

Well, I had better run if I am going to get anything done today.

13th Canadian Challenge - 5th Review - Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow

There is no question that I was drawn to this short novel by the title - Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow* by Jason Heroux.  I briefly debated combining this review with my discussion of Ionesco and the theatre of the absurd, but this novel is really a piece of surrealism (though the line between the two can certainly be thin).

Very early on we find that the narrator, Owen, used to be a dog, and that his father (oddly enough a human) is turning into a bicycle.  I'm not sure this was directly inspired by Bioy Casares's Asleep in the Sun, but there do seem to be a few similarities.  I think you'll know fairly quickly if this sounds intriguing or just silly.  (I tend to be very plot-oriented, and generally surrealism isn't that interesting to me, since it typically means stakes are necessarily low, since almost anything could happen at any time.)

What is a bit different about this is that there is a second plot strand about a company selling home security systems that comes by and installs a system in Owen and Lila's home, with a guarantee that they can cancel within 5 days.  Obviously, nothing could go awry...  Given that this is a much more naturalistic (and a somewhat common yet creepy) plot thread, it does seem to be a bit awkward to try to fit the two plots together, when in fact they are almost like chalk and cheese.

One thing I did like about the book is that there are six or so prose poems scattered throughout the novel.  (Heroux is a published poet as well as a novelist.)  A few of the poems comment directly on the novel, while others are more about the nature of transformation in a novel that features a lot of odd transformations.  In any event, it's a quick read (roughly an hour-long), so dive right in if you want to find out about some of the other transformations that occur throughout the novel.


* I typed "constant sorry" instead of "constant sorrow."  Perhaps I was trying to make this even more Canadian than it already is (with its name dropping No Frills and the double double from Tims).

13th Canadian Challenge - 4th Review - Frying Plantain

Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta was long-listed for the 2019 Giller Award, though it didn't make the short list.  Nonetheless, this is a fairly remarkable achievement because #1) this is actually a collection of short stories (which often get short shrift) and #2) this is the author's first published book.  However, it is true that this should rightly be considered a novel-in-stories.  One reviewer quipped that this really should be titled Lives of Black Girls and Women, and there are strong ties to Munro's classic novel-in-stories.

The stories focus on Kara, a young girl of Jamaican heritage as she grows up in Toronto.  The very first story "Pig Head" introduces her while she and her mother are staying with relatives in Jamaica.  She is viewed by her cousins as "soft," and her mother generally agrees with this assessment.  Viewing a severed pig head in the icebox is fairly traumatizing (though not as bad as watching her relatives kill chickens for soup), but she then uses the story to build up street cred at her school, back in Toronto.

Her mother, Eloise, had Kara when she was around 17, i.e. just a girl herself.  Kara's father is not present in the household, and Kara has very limited interactions with him.  Kara spends her time either with a group of school friends, mostly from the Caribbean, but also with her grandmother, Nana, and grandfather, George.

The relationship between Eloise and Kara's grandmother is incredibly tense.  They have very different outlooks on life, starting from Nana's attachment to her church and her devotion to house keeping.  Eloise and her mother get in a number of raging arguments during the various times that she and Kara have to move in with her mother.  In one instance, Nana throws Eloise out, and only lets them back for one week (while Eloise finds a new apartment) when Kara is asked to be the go-between.

Eloise is largely driven by a desire to improve her own lot -- and to make sure that her daughter doesn't make the same mistakes she did.  Incidentally, one of the reasons Eloise and Kara have to move back with Nana is that Eloise is a full-time grad student (in a PhD program* no less!).  Eloise does push Kara in school, and in fact relocates a few times to enroll Kara in "better" schools, with the result that she is cut off from her main group of friends, who are mostly second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean.

Minor SPOILER alert:

One refreshing aspect of this book is that, while Kara certainly struggles with math, she never completely ditches school in favour of her friends (at most skipping school a couple of times), and she graduates from high school with several offers from good universities.  Perhaps even more shocking (and in sharp contrast to Munro's Lives of Girls and Women), Kara does not throw her chance at university away, despite fooling around a bit with boys.  She only "goes the distance" with boys who use protection, unlike her mother...

Where Frying Plantain does seem similar to other immigrant narratives is that Kara never quite knows where she fits into Canadian culture.  Most of her friends, even after the move(s), are Caribbean.  On the other hand, Kara decides she wants to go into the humanities (media studies) rather than a more "practical" profession.  She does love her mother -- and her grandmother (in her own way) -- but she doesn't always see things the same way.  She is particularly aggravated by the way her grandfather cheats on Nana, and yet always has a home to come back to.  Kara doesn't want any part of these "country ways."  It's harder to say what the bonds between Eloise and Nana are, but they certainly seem frayed most of the time.  There doesn't seem to be any easy resolution to Kara's dilemmas (and the last stories are somewhat open-ended), but the reader generally supposes that she will go to university and probably ultimately see things more like her mother does. 


* I would say that this feels like a slight mis-step in the plot in the sense that the vast majority of people in Eloise's position (and certainly most immigrants) would pursue a professional degree or stop at a Master's degree.  PhDs actually have a negative earning potential for longer (than a Master's or most professional degrees), and in many cases individuals who stop at a Master's earn more than those with PhDs.  This is not true for Associate or Full professors, but the number of these slots has shriveled up since the 1990s; generally under 25% of PhD holders will become tenure-track professors (and in some fields it is more like 5%).  This article may actually be too rosy, and this piece from the Economist feels a bit more reflective of the reality.  This is a long digression, but I found it a very odd artistic choice to have Eloise pursue a PhD.

Fall Hits and Low-Key Halloween

It took a while, but we've finally gotten the fall leaves to turn.  There is an austere beauty in the plants that manage to stick it out into mid-autumn, though maybe austere isn't quite the right word for some of the brilliant colours we get.

The second photo is from my front yard.  In the lower right corner is a burning bush I put in last year.  It has frankly been a big disappointment in that the leaves don't turn bright red, but sort of a dark dusky purple.

Of course, it isn't too long after we get the leaves to turn that they all fall off the trees, and have to be swept/raked up.  In my case, I can put most of them in the back of the yard for composting.

As predicted, it was a fairly rainy Halloween last night.  (It rains most Halloweens, though last year was nice and dry.)  There were a few stretches between 6 and 7 where the rain slowed down to a light drizzle or even a misting, and a few parents brought their kids out, but then around 7 the rain came down pretty heavily again, and the trick-or-treating was effectively over.

My daughter wanted to go out, and she put on a cat costume, but got bored after a few houses.  So we came back in, and she handed out candy for a while.  We switched off the lights at 7:30.  I have some candy left over, but not a ridiculous pile.  (If so, I would have just taken it to work, but I don't think I'll bother.)

We don't put out a lot of decorations, but a couple of posters on the front of the house, and I recently bought some orange outdoor lights.

This year, for the first time in many years, I did carve a pumpkin, under the direction of my daughter.  She wanted it to look like the pumpkin was vomiting out its insides.  Mission accomplished, I think.

Then we set it outside on the bench, and the squirrels made it even a bit grosser.

All in all, a somewhat disappointing Halloween, but it could certainly have been worse.  Incredibly, it was snowing in Chicago* (the snow in our forecast fizzled out a day or two ago, though we'll probably get snow fairly soon).  In Montreal and other parts of Quebec, the heavy rain and winds led to the mayor asking parents to reschedule Halloween to Nov. 1!  I'm sure that went over well, and fortunately there was no rescheduling of Halloween in Toronto.

* I'm still sort of processing just how awful it must be to live in those parts of Chicago where gang-bangers will openly shoot across the street when there are kids around trick-or-treating.  I hope that this terrible event will be too much for some, and that the no-snitch code frays and someone turns them in.