Almodovar Update

I never did snag a ticket further back for Labyrinth of Passion, but it was ok from the 2nd row.  Just as with Talk to Her, I realized that I watched this movie after borrowing it from Robarts, though somehow I must have been too tired, as I completely forgot the subplot of the woman from the dry cleaners undergoing plastic surgery to look like Sexilla!  I may have also watched Pepi. Luci and Bom, but perhaps not,* so I requested that again and should have it soon (unless Robarts has shut down for winter break).

I did manage to read the three stories in Munro's Runaway that inspired Julietta.  Two I liked, but I thought the third was pretty sad.  It will be curious if Almodovar covers that much of the woman's life.  He notoriously doesn't like sad endings, so I'm not sure how much he did take from the third story, but I'll find out fairly soon.

There's a pretty good chance I will wrap up both Runaway and The Love of a Good Woman this month.  I might also take on Joy Williams's Taking Care, though I still wanted to see if I could read Kilometer 101 before the end of the year.  Since I am on the TTC a lot more these days, I do get more reading in.  I did ride my bike today as it was just a bit warmer, but I regretted it coming home from TIFF, as the temperature dropped again.  I also found my glove liners, so the whole business of stopping at MEC before Brazil was particularly pointless.  I just have to keep reminding myself not to go back into MEC.

I need to wrap this up pretty soon.  I need to get some rest, since I am leaving early in the morning to take a bus to Buffalo.  I'm mostly going to the Albright-Knox to check out the Marisol exhibit, though I may make it over to Target, though it depends a lot on the timing.  I am taking a slightly earlier bus back (4:25 instead of 6:15), since I don't like hanging out at the Buffalo Greyhound, so I don't have a lot of slack time in the schedule, and I likely will end up cabbing it at least part of the time.

Anyway, when I get back, I will see if I feel up to going to the gym (I only went swimming over the weekend), and I need to wrap a few presents, and I also need to make more progress on getting my expenses into the system.  As always just a few too many things going on all at once.

* I actually later had some back and forth with someone at Robarts who says that their copy is Region 2 (and PAL), which is fine, and has no English subtitles, which is not.  Disappointing, and that clearly means I never did watch this and had watched Labyrinth of Passion instead.  There is one version of Pepi floating around that has burned in subs, though this is out of print.  The same version is on Almodovar Collection 1, available in Region 2.  It turns out that they have 3 of the other films in the set, so are not likely to order it.  I have 2, though I don't have Dark Habits.  I thought it was an interesting film, but probably not one I would watch very often, and I don't want to duplicate the others.  Also, Pepi, Luci and Bom is supposed to be a fairly weak offering, and not something that I would watch more than once.  Maybe I should have tried harder to see it during the retrospective.  Now if Labyrinth of Passion had been included in the box set instead of Women on the Verge, then yes I would have ordered it.  In general I am trying to avoid too much overlap and am waiting to see if Criterion or someone else puts out a truly comprehensive Blu-ray set.  Here's hoping.

Almodovar Count-down

I decided I would go ahead and just list all of Almodovar's films and then I can try to keep track of them and whether I have seen them or not.  If I am scheduled to watch something at TIFF through the end of Dec., I'll just put down TIFF and assume nothing will go wrong (always a risky assumption...).  O stands for I own this on DVD.  (While there is one Blu-Ray Almodovar set, it is mostly the early films, and otherwise Criterion only has singles, and I am trying not to go that route, as I expect one of these days Criterion will put out a Blu-Ray set of his entire oeuvre, though maybe I am just dreaming.)

Pepi, Luci, Bom 
Labyrinth of Passion TIFF
Dark Habits TIFF
O What Have I Done to Deserve This?
O Matador (Own on Almodovar Collection V.2 but not watched)
O Law of Desire TIFF
O Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (TIFF screening will be 3rd viewing)
O Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! TIFF
High Heels
O Kika TIFF
O The Flower of My Secret TIFF
O Live Flesh
O All About My Mother Paradise & TIFF
O Talk to Her TIFF*
O Bad Education Paradise
O Volver TIFF
Broken Embraces TIFF
The Skin I Live In TIFF
I'm So Excited! (Watched on DVD)
Julieta TIFF
Pain and Glory TIFF
Parallel Mothers TIFF
The Human Voice/Strange Way of Life (TIFF showed these two shorts together)
The Room Next Door TIFF

Marking it all down means I really will have seen (or can fairly easily see) all of Almodovar with the exception of Dark Habits** and High Heels.

In terms of my favorites, I rank Women on the Verge first, followed by All About My Mother, Pain and Glory and Volver.  I expect I'll like Talk to Her, which is another highly rated film, and I do hope I enjoy What Have I Done to Deserve This? whenever I finally get around to watching it.  About the only one that didn't do a lot for me was Parallel Mothers.

It's somewhat interesting that I watched Women on the Verge on its initial release (and loved it), and then was so turned off by the plot of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! that I kind of went off Almodovar through the 90s and 2000s (obviously my loss).  It really wasn't until Pain and Glory in 2019 that I started watching his films again on the big screen on their initial release. 

* I was reading something about the plot of Talk to Her, and I realized I have seen it already!  The struggle is figuring out where and when.  I thought the most likely candidate was the Paradise, but it wasn't part of the Queer Cinema Club offerings; Google doesn't appear to think it played at Paradise or at TIFF or even at Carlton either in 2023 or 2024.  It's certainly possible I broke down and watched it on DVD, but I don't recall doing that.  So weird.

** I decided to take a quick look, and while I do have a conflict with TIFF's screening of High Heels, I actually can catch a screening of Dark Habits in a couple of weeks.  (There would have been a conflict with Dark Habits, but Bad Bad No Good was asking a ridiculous price for tickets to a gig at Lee's Palace!  I suspect if this is what they think they are worth, I won't ever see them.  C'est dommage...)  In fact, I got the very last ticket to Dark Habits right after I decided to look!  Fortuitous.  I will still want to check in a few more times to see if I can get a seat a bit further back for Labyrinth of Passion.  

Movies & Books (Dec. 2024)

So hard to believe it is Dec. already!  I'm probably running a bit ahead of where I thought I would be with movies (particularly catching up with a lot I've never seen including The Shining and The Godfather 1 and 2 and then of course this amazing Almodovar festival at TIFF).  While I still find dealing with TIFF incredibly frustrating, I was persistent enough to get tickets to all the Almodovar films that caught my eye, with the exception of What Did I Do to Deserve This, where I have a conflict that just can't be resolved.  As it happens I do have WDIDtDT on DVD, so maybe a bit after the fest ends, I will watch this, as well as lobby for Carlton Cinema to show it as a $5 throwback movie.

Just a quick follow up on Almodovar.  I had totally forgotten that I saw Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown on the big screen at Paradise, but not as part of their Queen Cinema Club.  So at the tail end of December I will have seen it for the third time on the big screen, but bringing my son along.  I will also watch Pain & Glory for the second time (tonight in fact) and All About My Mother twice as well.  These are probably his strongest films for me.  The same day as All About My Mother, I am seeing an advance screening of The Room Next Door, which is his first feature length film in English (with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore).  I'll basically just have time to run between the two.  As it happens, they also added The Apartment even earlier in the afternoon, so you could run between all three.  It's sold out now, and I am wondering if I would even enjoy watching three films in a row, even though I haven't seen The Apartment in its entirety.  I might check back in at a later date.  Anyway, about a week ago, I decided I could squeeze in Kika and The Labyrinth of Passion.  It took quite a few tries, but I finally got a ticket for each, though I am in the second row for Labyrinth, and I will try to get a better seat closer to the time and cancel the one in the 2nd row (or maybe give it to a friend).

On Tues. I went and saw Brazil, probably for the first time on the big screen.  For a long time, this was my favorite movie.  I find the Sam Lowry character to be a bit on the annoying side now, though I don't know that I have any other movie that is clearly my new favorite movie, though possibly Women on the Verge...  I had left work a few minutes late, and then made a stop off at MEC to try to buy some glove liners.  What a mistake.  The place is now quite badly organized and there wasn't anyone to help me, so I had to wait in line and ask the cashier.  Then it was impossible to actually pay for the glove liners, so I just left.  MEC has disappointed me several times in the last few months, and I simply have to expunge it from my mental map as a place worth visiting.  At any rate, I showed up at Carlton at 6:49, which should have been absolutely no issue (because Brazil was actually going to start at 6:55), but there was a line out the door to get tickets to something else.  I have never seen Carlton that busy.  Even the self-serve ticket machine had a long line and didn't seem to be working either.  I asked the guy at the concession stand if I could just pay for the movie (which I think can be done at Market Square) and he said he couldn't help me.  I finally cut into the line and handed the ticket seller $5 and ran in, getting there just seconds before the pre-credits explosion.  (This is quite reminiscent of Taxi Driver where I cut it way, way too close.)  I also was sitting behind someone who was just slightly too tall.  But I enjoyed the movie.  It does make a difference seeing it at that scale, so I'm glad I went, even though it wasn't an ideal experience.

It's taken quite a while, but I finally finished Eric DuPont's Songs for the Cold of Heart.  I didn't like some of the cheap and easy postmodernism early on in novel (the grandmother sticking around forever after dying the first time) and the sheer number of coincidences at the end were annoying (similar to what turned me off on Powning's The Sea Captain's Wife).  The middle sections were pretty good.  I haven't decided if I am going to hang onto my signed copy or try to sell it off.  Probably the latter, but I'll hold off for a few weeks to make my final decision.  

I also finished off Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.  I generally found this too annoying.  I like Murakami's short stories and I remember generally liking After Dark, but a lot of his novels don't work for me, between somewhat passive characters that just let events overtake them and too much woo-woo mysticism.  And his books are too long.  In particular, I didn't much like 1985, which was much too long.  It very much sounds like his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls​​, is just full of everything I don't like about his work.  I suppose I am a glutton for punishment, as I do have a hold on this at the library, though I have suspended the hold for now...

Anyway, this was final wrapping up of the books I had taken on longish trips to Stratford and then to NYC/DC (where I could have finished the book had I stayed awake on the NYC-DC train ride!).  I am planning a trip to Buffalo next week, and I am deciding between Mutis's The Adventures of Maqroll ✓ and Soseki's I am a Cat ✓.  And I am also pretty seriously considering making a trip out to Ottawa in March (to finally see Collective Soul as well as Our Lady Peace*), and I suppose I would take the one I don't take to Buffalo if I actually do go to Ottawa.  (I was a bit more successful in finishing Oliver Twist right after my last Edmonton trip, and it didn't drag on quite so long.  Oliver Twist was much better than Nicolas Nickleby, even though the denouement was fairly weak.)

I recently abandoned Thomas Bernhard's Extinction.  It just wasn't working for me.  This blog makes an argument for Bernhard's fiction, but I am still not convinced.  Just not for me, particularly in my current mood.  The novel is just one ridiculously long stream-of-consciousness rant by an uber snob (speaking as a snob myself, he was just too much).  He spends pretty much all of his mental energy running down his recently deceased parents and younger brother.  Nope, not for me.  For a short while I was reading this while cycling at the gym because the other two books were just too long and bulky.  That isn't an issue now that I have switched back to shorter books, and indeed short stories.  I am jumping ahead to read the first 4 stories in Munro's Runaway, since Almodovar's Julieta is based on them, then I will circle back to finish For the Love of a Good Woman (and then most likely finish off Runaway), so a lot of Munro this month, even though I still find her a pretty terrible human being.  But I am interspersing with Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women, where the stories are a bit shorter.

I'm hoping before the year ends, I will actually get to Osipov's Kilometer 101, though this may not happen.  I am reading some much shorter fiction, along with everything else, but I will just have to discuss that at a later time.

Coda: While I initially balked at the dead essentially following Francis around in Ironweed, I am getting used to it, and in fact it is used sparingly in the later chapters.  This does remind me a fair bit of Rulfo's Pedro Páramo ✓.  This novel didn't do a lot for me on first reading, but it is short (and highly praised by others), and I hung onto it.  I am wondering if maybe I should reread this right after Ironweed and then settle whether I want to keep it or not.  Some of the other short books I have in the stack are a book of Orwell's lesser known essays and then perhaps Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. I should be able to squeeze in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, though it is at the bottom of the stack, and recently I added Jelloun's The Last Friend ✓ and Azuela's The Underdogs ✓ (which would pair well with Rulfo's novel).  As always, too much to read and not enough time to do it in.

* I'm going to wait 2 more weeks to see if they add a Toronto date to this tour, but so far it seems they are only playing smaller cities, in Canada at least.

Movie Time

Just back from The Godfather (Pt 1), which was at Carlton Cinema.  Again, I worked until almost the last minute and was almost late, though I did have my bike with me.  This time I made it during previews.  The happened to me a few months back when I turned up just as Taxi Driver was actually starting, though I don't think I missed anything.  And then just a few weeks back I actually came in maybe a minute into Kiki's Delivery Service.  That was super frustrating (in part because the TTC was exceptionally slow), though I had seen the movie before.

It's kind of incredible how many major movies I haven't actually seen (up until now), including The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown and The Shining, all of which I saw at the Carlton for $5.  I think it was a few years back that Hot Docs had some documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy, and they also showed the movie itself.  I tried to work it out, but just couldn't watch it.  

Now I have managed to see Rear Window and North by Northwest on the big screen twice each (once in Toronto and once in Chicago), though I haven't seen Vertigo on the big screen.  I couldn't quite see The Sweet Smell of Success on the big screen, though I have at least seen it.

This weekend, Carlton is showing The Godfather, Pt II.  I think I'll go, even though it is 3+ hours, and they are showing it without an intermission!  

I think Paradise was showing Network and The China Syndrome, neither of which I've seen, but I wasn't able to go.

In the end I did manage to snag a ticket to one more Almodovar film (The Flower of My Secret).  I need to stop looking at Dec. 22, when they are showing What Have I Done to Deserve This, since I am going to the Sing-Along Messiah on that day.  In a perfect world, Tiff would shift the time of movie by a couple of hours and move it to a bigger theatre, so I could do both, but that doesn't seem likely.  I'll just have to see if What Have I Done to Deserve This shows up at Paradise or maybe The Revue one of these days.

I'm still a bit annoyed at how short the distribution run for Rumours was and it doesn't appear to be showing up on any streaming site or at a second-run theatre, though I am keeping my eyes out.  Bah.  I haven't seen anything announced for Cronenberg's Shrouds but that will definitely play Tiff again (and quite likely Market Square).  I think Carlton is supposed to be getting My Neighbour Toroto in in the next few weeks, and I'll probably go see that a second time.  (This is actually the film that launched my recent exploration of the Ghibli Studio work.)  The first week of Dec., Carlton is also showing Brazil.  Now I've seen Brazil quite a few times (6 or so), but I am not actually sure I have seen it on the big screen (only on home video), so I will try to make it for that.

A few days after that, I will probably see Orson Welles's F for Fake.  I have seen a fair number of Welles's films though not all that many on the big screen.  I'm pretty sure I saw The Lady from Shanghai at Film Forum in NYC, and Touch of Evil at the Paradise.  (I didn't actually think that much of Touch of Evil because so many characters just were so stupid...)

I did manage to see Varda's Murs Murs at the Paradise recently and enjoyed that.  I also saw The Beaches of Agnes at the Paradise and Faces Places at Tiff.  I tried a couple of times but haven't seen Cleo from 5 to 7 on the big screen.  Maybe some day.

Now I have managed to see most of Tati on the big screen.  I remember seeing Playtime in Chicago (and apparently a second time which I don't recall), and I am sure I saw Mon Oncle and M. Hulot's Vacances.  This might well have been New York.  I am much less sure if I saw Trafic in a theatre or not.

Finally, I remember I finally saw Fellini's La Dolce Vita at Tiff and then Amarcord at The Revue.  I don't go to The Revue very often, but they are showing La Dolce Vita in late Jan., and this is probably worth going to a second time.

Wet, wet day

Yesterday started out pretty badly, though I will admit that I didn't get rained on, which was a strong possibility.  Seeing that the bus was 8 minutes away, I walked up a couple of stops.  I looked to see if it was coming but it wasn't there, so I started walking to the next one, only for the bus to pass me.  That was so frustrating; it is so rare for TTC buses to actually make up time that I simply don't put it into my personal decision matrix.  Needless to say, I was then late for work and an early morning meeting.  Then Teams was acting up.  I could have probably handled a bit of lag on the audio, but it was just not working at all, so I had to restart the machine entirely.  It was a very poor start to the day.

The middle of the day got better but never amazing.  I was really struggling to get people to do what I wanted them to do in a timely manner.  And I had to take on a GIS task that should have been relatively simple (extracting highway links) but in the end was a manual process that took hours.  I wrapped it up at 6:55, emailed it off (because it was a critical item in someone else's workflow), then ran for the train.  I made it to Coal Mine Theatre at 7:31 or so.  I felt really terrible, since I was one of those people that they hold the show for.  (Almost every play in Toronto starts 5-10 minutes late, but I think this is almost impossible to change because traffic and particularly the TTC is so unreliable.  I will say that the TTC did ok in getting me there for once, and it was entirely my fault for working up to the very last minute.)  I ended up in a kind of crappy seat right next to some duct work that forced me to sit at a weird angle.  If I had had another minute or two, I would have moved up a row or two and it would have been better.  It didn't help that I had forgot my glasses (and my work pass!), so it just wasn't a great day in general.

It was a good though very depressing play about two single fathers, whose access to their daughters is gradually stripped back, along with other life challenges that they face.  I think my friend who struggled with infertility and then briefly explored adoption would not have enjoyed it very much.  I wasn't entirely sold on the very last scene (and I do find it almost impossible that one character wouldn't remember the other one (a Black man in Idaho!) from school), but otherwise it was a strong play.

Leaving the theatre, it was just pouring out.  That was not great.  And I went over to a Thai place, but it closed at 9!  Then there was a small store that also sold Ethiopian food but it looked like every seat in the place was full.  I looked in at two pizza places but decided they weren't that appealing, so I just went home.

I got pretty wet.  The book I had with me didn't get wet until sometime towards the very end of the trip, perhaps the very, very long wait for a bus in the rain (because the Ontario Line construction closed the Pape bus loop!).  It doesn't appear that the basement flooded, which is a small mercy, but generally it was a pretty bad end to the day.

Down the Rabbit Hole

While I often go quite deep down the rabbit hole in terms of books I am pursuing, right now I have been bitten by the classical music bug, which happens periodically.  About the only positive is that this sometimes chases away my need to buy jazz or pop/rock music...

Anyway, my trip to NYC and DC came off fairly well, though I was very exhausted by the end of it.  I made it home around 9:30 or so and then just crashed for a while.  I had thought it might be worth running to the Regent Park Pool to at least sit in the hot tub, but that didn't happen.  Instead, around 2 I finally got myself together and went to the Toronto Reference Library to see what they had left on the last day of their book sale.  I ended up getting a couple of art books, a large stack of books destined for the Little Free Library (though at least a handful I'll try to read myself first) and then a CD box set of all of Haydn's Symphonies conducted by Antal Dorati.  This was half price but still a bit on the pricey side, since there are 31 CDs (Haydn wrote a ridiculous number of symphonies).  I actually had miscalculated and had to put back one book (Sarong Party Girls, which the publisher somewhat incredibly calls an updated Emma set in Singapore).  But then I ask myself when will I ever listen to this or indeed any of the classical box sets I've picked up in the last 10 years.  I did a much better job of getting through them before then, and I have generally been better about listening to the jazz or world music CDs I've picked up along the way.

I actually built a shelf that holds a bunch of box sets that I really ought to listen to before buying anything else.  When I look at the shelf, sometimes my heart does ache a bit that I don't have a life where I can just listen to music and forget about everything else.  It's not like I listened to a lot of music at work previously, but way back in the day laptops had CD players!  And then after that, they at least had ports for portable CD players.  But then I migrated into a job where all the USB ports are turned off for security reasons, which causes me no end of grief in trying to transfer large files, which indeed is necessary for my work more than you might imagine.  Even if I did take a month or more just to rip everything once and for all (and ideally see if I could trade in the box sets after all that), I probably still wouldn't listen to a lot of it, at least not at work.  At work, I pretty much only listen to Bandcamp (and I have an absurd amount of music archived there as well).

At any rate, because I was searching around for the Dorati Hayden set, Amazon recommended that I check out these other box sets of his mono recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (most of which were never on CD) and his stereo recordings with Minneapolis (which are far more available).  And then for good measure they pointed me to a box set of his recordings with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.  After pondering it for a long time, I decided that there was so much that I simply wouldn't listen to, and I should cherry pick what I was most interested in, and then see if I could borrow it from a library or listen to it on iTunes or Naxos.

It looks like pretty much all of the stereo records are on iTunes (and these are the recordings that have had the broadest release and re-issuing) and most though probably not all of the mono recordings are available.  The DSO recordings on Decca are harder to come by, though I think most of them are on Naxos.

I tried to whittle it down a fair bit and ended up with the following:

Copland - El Salon Mexico and Danzon Cubano.  (I have the other key Copland pieces Dorati performed on another CD.)
Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (mono - I have the stereo already)
Stravinsky - The Firebird (mono and stereo, and I guess I should check out the DSO version on Decca)
Respighi - Pines of Rome & Fountains of Rome 
Gershwin - Porgy and Bess Suite 
Bartok - Suite No 1 (DSO on Decca)

I actually came reasonably close to ordering the Bartok on LP (from a seller in Ottawa) but realized just in time that I could just listen to it on Naxos instead.

I spent far more time than I should have this evening tracking down the mini Dorati box set I already own, as well as Dorati Conducts Kodaly and Bartok, but I did find both.  This really speaks to needing to get better organized and certainly to rip the music that I really think is worth listening to.

Then I was partially sucked in by a George Szell set: The Warner Recordings, 1934-70.  This one is all on iTunes, so there is nowhere near the same pressure.  I will definitely be listening to his Dvorak Symphony 8 and probably Schubert's Symphony 9, as well as Brahms Double Concerto (with Oistrakh and Rostropovich!).  As it happens, the Double Concerto is in all kinds of box sets, and I have it in an Oistrakh box set and probably at least one or two other places.  I am pondering ordering a subset of this box, which is a 3 CD set of the Beethoven Piano Concertos performed by Gilels with Szell conducting.  That might be something I would listen to on more than one occasion, and it is still available relatively cheaply.  But it isn't something that I absolutely need, and I probably should hold off at least for another week or two and not just make another late-night impulse purchase!  (Which I have certainly been known to do...)

Melville-Darwin Link

There is an interesting (to me) historic link between Charles Darwin and Herman Melville in that both visited and wrote about the Galapagos Islands.  Darwin of course featured them in his write-up of his trip on the The Beagle.  Melville wrote a series of 10 sketches called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, which I just wrapped up.  I was not sure whether Melville had actually visited the Galapagos, but indeed he did visit them on his first whaling voyage.  It's less clear whether he himself hunted for tortoises (the text suggests he did unsuccessfully though this may be fictionalized) or simply helped load them on board.  I did think his vision of the ancient tortoise carrying the world on its back (as in some mythologies as well as Pratchett's Discworld) was pretty interesting and perhaps the highlight of The Encantadas.

I also wrapped up Billy Budd.  For the most part, it felt too abbreviated.  I did find the last few chapters showing how "broken telephone" led to a completely false version of events among the general public while a very different (and more broadly accurate) version was circulated among the crew as a sea chanty.  This seemed a bit reminiscent of what Faulkner was up to in A Fable, though I didn't like A Fable at all.

I had mixed feelings about Manu Joseph's Serious Men, particularly the well-worn trope (at least in novels written by middle aged men) of a beautiful young woman falling for a man old enough to be her father and then trying to destroy him after she was scorned.  I could have done without that for sure!

I didn't like the first one-third of DuPont's The American Fiancée, mostly because of some lazy magic realism where the grandmother dies but then hangs out at a funeral home (and later a convent) for many decades waiting her second death.  There just didn't seem to be any point to it.  I can't remember off the top of my head if the same sort of thing happens in Kroetsch's What the Crow Said, but I thought so.  (What may be more curious is that I am negatively comparing DuPont to Kroetsch, but at the time I wasn't all that crazy about What the Crow Said either, thinking it had too much pointless magic realism!)  But the later sections focusing on the great-children and what they get up to in Europe is much more interesting to me.  I have a bit under 200 pages to go, so I will likely finish this up as soon as I am back from NYC and DC.  After this, I have short stories by Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women) and Alice Munro.  I haven't completely given up on Munro, though I am certainly not rushing to get through her work.  I did get a few stories into The Love of a Good Woman, but I really need to read the 3 stories from Runaway that Almodovar used as the basis of Julieta, so I'll make sure I get to them soon.  And then I'll finally read Osipov's Kilometer 101 (NYRB).

Speaking of the NYC trip, FedEx did get me my ticket to McNeal, so I will be going to that.  (The poetry books haven't turned up at my friend's house, but there is another day or so, so I have some hope...)  I haven't 100% decided on whether I will try to get to the Jewish Museum or MoMA on this trip.  I'm leaning towards squeezing them in, but it just depends on how quickly I get through the Met and the Guggenheim on Wed.  I would like to try to see The Phillips Collection on Friday, but I don't think that will happen.  I will say I don't feel ready to make the trip, but it is just around the corner (tomorrow actually)!  So I had better drop off and start getting ready for the rest of the day.  Ciao!