I decided to try to pull together a few strands, such as books that I found highly influential as I was evolving as a reader (here and here) and my favorite books written in English from the 20th Century (here). That said, there are major gaps in this list, namely books that I will probably like (maybe even like a lot) but just haven't gotten around to reading (some noted here and here), so I obviously can't recommend them now. I've decided to not recommend any poetry this time around (and essentially no drama aside from Beckett and no science fiction or other genre fiction), but on the other hand, this list will have the advantage of dipping into world literature. To keep this from devolving into some enormous list of every book I ever gave a thumbs up to, I'll try to restrict it to books that really stood out from the crowd (and that I can still remember years after reading them). While it would be unlikely for anyone else to like every single book on this list, I would not hesitate to recommend these books. I suppose the one thing that I could do is split them further apart into novels that are essentially comic or dramatic/tragic, but I am not going to do that at this time.
Books you probably were (generally) aware of:
Lawrence Sterne - Tristram Shandy (not for everyone but a radically inventive novel well ahead of its time)
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
Elie Wiesel - Night
Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Franz Kafka - The Castle
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories
James Joyce - Dubliners
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet (Justine/Balthazar/Mountolive/Clea)
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Iris Murdoch - Under the Net
Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges - A Personal Anthology
Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces (riotous novel with a somewhat unpleasant main character)
Graham Greene - Travels with my Aunt
Philip Roth - Zuckerman Bound
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Alan Paton - Cry, the Beloved Country
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Don DeLillo - White Noise
More obscure books:
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Joseph Roth - Hotel Savoy
Donald Barthelme - City Life
Donald Barthelme - The Dead Father
Madison Smartt Bell - Waiting for the End of the World
Robertson Davies - The Deptford Tril. (Fifth Business/The Manticore/World of Wonders)
Timothy Findley - Not Wanted on the Voyage
Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
Robert Kroetsch - The Studhorse Man
Guy Vanderhaeghe - My Present Age (essentially a Canadian version of A Confederacy of Dunces, though written completely independently)
Henry Roth - Call It Sleep
Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The Autumn of the Patriarch
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Green House
Stuart Dybek - The Coast of Chicago
Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City
Albert Cossery - The Jokers
Michael Malone - Handling Sin
Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
Mutis - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Steven Sherrill - The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
Susan Swan - The Biggest Modern Woman of the World
Edna O'Brien - Night
Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus
Andrey Platonov - Happy Moscow
Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol
Stefan Zweig - Selected Stories
Graham Greene - Monsignor Quixote
J.F. Powers - Morte D'Urban
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake
Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide
Can Themba - Requiem for Sophiatown
Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket
Tom Stoppard - Arcadia (not entirely sure plays should be included as they really only take life
on stage, but this may be my favorite play of all time, a notch or two
above Tony Kushner's Angels in America, which is also incredible of course.)
If I find any other amazing gems among the books on my long list of books (as I certainly hope I would), I will try to remember to add them (perhaps below this break). Certainly I think of reading as a life-long adventure, so while I am occasionally embarrassed not to have gotten to some must-read novel by now (my mid-40s), there is something to be said in still having so many great works to discover going forward. (Also, don't hesitate to recommend your own books in the comments, or tell me which of the books from this post I should read next.)
Added 7/27/2016:
While it would be a stretch to call them life-changing, every so often I enjoy more lyrical, slower paced novels. In this category, I can recommend
Willa Cather - My Antonia
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead (this was unexpectedly moving, particularly considering how little consideration I have for organized (or unorganized and/or personal) religion -- apparently this is among President Obama's favorite novels)
In a slightly different (though still interior) vein, I enjoyed Penelope Lively's City of the Mind. It's relatively short, and I probably ought to reread it before completely enthusiastically recommending it, but I do remember liking it.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Saturday, October 17, 2015
My neighbourhood
In the move across the train tracks we went from South Riverdale (almost-but-not-quite Leslieville, which was George Walker's old stomping grounds) to Riverdale. Some would say we are actually in Blake-Jones, but since the kids aren't going to Blake St. School, I would say we are in Riverdale.
What is particularly interesting about this neighbourhood is that we have fairly easy access to Withrow Park, which is a really nice feature. I've gone to the farmers' market a few times, as well as Dances at Dusk and some plays put on in the park. We did a bit of sledding last year and expect to go more often this winter. Ideally, my daughter will learn to skate in Withrow. Now we haven't gone a lot to Riverdale Park, as it is just a bit longer to get there. But all these things are kind of "nice things" that upper middle class people get.
Where this neighbourhood is quite different is that if you live a bit further north, you would mostly shop up on Danforth. I have to say I wasn't all that impressed with the grocery stores up there, though the other stores were fine. One of the groceries was particularly chi-chi. In contrast, we generally shop at two groceries stores right on Gerrard where the customers are really price-sensitive, which exerts a lot of downward pressure on the prices. In fact, all the stores at Gerrard Square with the exception of Staples and Home Depot are geared towards lower income shoppers. So we definitely benefit from that, even though I wouldn't have minded a Sears or a Target (with US-levels of selection) instead of the Walmart, though of course both would probably have folded by this point. I don't think I am particularly cheap (my family might disagree...) but I do demand value for money, and I think we do a bit better on the south end of Riverdale than they do at the north end.
If they do open up a GO Rail stop at Gerrard Square or Jones Ave. (which is tentatively in the Metrolinx master plan), it will be interesting to see just how fast South Riverdale, Blake-Jones and Leslieville gentrify. I think they would, particularly given that housing prices around already seem awfully inflated! I'd like to see that, as I would definitely benefit from it, and I think it would actually help overall subway crowding just about as much as the Downtown Relief Line, but at a much, much lower cost.
I'm not entirely sure how many middle class people (aside from us) shop at Gerrard Square but surely some. I've certainly seen quite a few clashes at the mall over people with different backgrounds and ideas of what is proper. I was so disappointed to hear this white man to say some really horrible things about Asian drivers while his young son was right there. Do I understand that he is resentful of all this competition from immigrants when his economic position appears to be really precarious? Sure, but I don't approve. Still, it is fairly easy to criticize when I am on the sidelines. I am not threatened by low- or medium-skilled migrants coming to Canada. While there are obviously some drawbacks to community cohesion, on the whole I am in favour of mass migration (provided there are some ground rules about what is not acceptable behaviour in Canada), though of course I would say that being a high-skilled migrant myself (who slipped in just before another round of rule changes to the immigration laws).
One bit of cultural clash that would be interesting to explore (that Walker only has hinted at so far) is how the folks living near me are largely, though not entirely, workaholics and there is a different relationship to work south of the tracks. Some of the workers work extremely hard at precarious jobs (and this may be the most true of the migrants who are "only" permanent residents and have almost no access to Canada's social safety net), but work still doesn't seem to define their identity the way it can for certain skilled workers. I would say on the whole there is a bit more casualness towards work on the south side. (And this may well be a healthier perspective or at least reflect a more realistic attitude as to how much any particular worker is actually valued (or needed) by a corporation. It's just not a perspective I seem to be able to adopt. I may come back to this point when I write about Machado de Assis's novels in a future blog.)
As a good example, we had planned to go to a mobile phone store and finally get my wife switched over to a new service and a new smart phone. The store wasn't scheduled to open until 11, so we walked around the block and waited outside. There was absolutely no indication that anyone was inside getting ready to open up. I even called the store number, and the call went to a number that did not have an active voice mailbox, so I couldn't even leave a message. We waited 10 or so minutes and then went home. It's very possible that the employee turned up at 11:30. He was almost certainly there by noon, but it is too late. This casualness has cost him a sale, since we will now deal with the mobile company over at the Eaton Centre tomorrow. It's this frisson between different expectations of how to behave and what is "reasonable" or "proper" that are actually quite interesting. I might explore this just a bit in this short piece I am working on for the next Sing-for-Your-Supper, though this would be a case where only one of the characters is "slumming," trying to hang out with the cool kids who are actually from a lower social class. For the most part I find it easier to write when everyone in the play is from roughly the same class position, though I do find myself exploring when people come from different ethnic backgrounds. I don't know how successful I actually am at this (I'll elicit more feedback later), but it is something I have tackled 3 times now. I don't know that I am ready yet to write a piece which features major class divides as well as racial or ethnic divides, but I will probably get there someday.
Certainly the broader neighbourhood (5 or so blocks in all directions) should provide some terrific source material. In addition to our mobile phone "saga," there are some very interesting stories about parents who manage to get their kids anchored into a particular school and then move quite a distance away where the rent is cheaper. I found that this was a technique pretty common in Chicago, and I guess I admire parents for exploring/exploiting the same loopholes here, perhaps because in Toronto, unless Chicago, it seems to be migrant families who do take more advantage of this, i.e. this isn't simply some other way that middle class white families exploit their cultural capital to work the system, the way it was in Chicago. I shouldn't complain too much, as we benefited from the system in Chicago, though in our case we only moved a short distance away but wanted to stay in the same school. In Toronto, just as in Chicago, the school catchment areas are quite irregular and even a bit perverse in some neighbourhoods.
I haven't spent enough time at the Community Centre to have any interesting tales there, but I may find out more from my kids who are enrolled in some sports there. While I am recycling this picture, I think it is a classic one, showing just how few kids came out to celebrate the Christmas holiday whereas in Vancouver (and presumably at least some other Toronto centres) these pancake breakfasts were packed. I call this picture "The Loneliest Santa."
Edit to add: I actually forgot how much drama there can be at these grocery stores. Most of the clashes at the Food Basics are in the parking lot, while No Frills has plenty of parking, but seems to serve a slightly wider range of customers (class-wise at any rate). I've seen some really ugly interactions at the cash registers, particularly when there is a frustrated middle class customer treating the cashiers badly. It just seems to me that everyone is more on edge than they used to be and certainly a lot of the vaunted Canadian "niceness" has been somewhat worn away. There certainly are not that many novels set in supermarkets, though there are a few set in small stores or delis (maybe Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is the best known early example). There is a whole string of contemporary novels with a scene here or there set in a store as part of a larger commentary on consumerism (DeLillo's White Noise is the exemplar but also Ballard's Kingdom Come and of course some of the stories by Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver -- "A Small, Good Thing" obviously). The one quite recent novel that kind of gets at what I am contemplating at the moment is The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavić, which despite its title only has a relatively few scenes set in or actually outside a supermarket, but they are quite interesting because of various cultural clashes. I've been meaning to review this for a while, so I guess I will just go ahead and do that now.
What is particularly interesting about this neighbourhood is that we have fairly easy access to Withrow Park, which is a really nice feature. I've gone to the farmers' market a few times, as well as Dances at Dusk and some plays put on in the park. We did a bit of sledding last year and expect to go more often this winter. Ideally, my daughter will learn to skate in Withrow. Now we haven't gone a lot to Riverdale Park, as it is just a bit longer to get there. But all these things are kind of "nice things" that upper middle class people get.
Where this neighbourhood is quite different is that if you live a bit further north, you would mostly shop up on Danforth. I have to say I wasn't all that impressed with the grocery stores up there, though the other stores were fine. One of the groceries was particularly chi-chi. In contrast, we generally shop at two groceries stores right on Gerrard where the customers are really price-sensitive, which exerts a lot of downward pressure on the prices. In fact, all the stores at Gerrard Square with the exception of Staples and Home Depot are geared towards lower income shoppers. So we definitely benefit from that, even though I wouldn't have minded a Sears or a Target (with US-levels of selection) instead of the Walmart, though of course both would probably have folded by this point. I don't think I am particularly cheap (my family might disagree...) but I do demand value for money, and I think we do a bit better on the south end of Riverdale than they do at the north end.
If they do open up a GO Rail stop at Gerrard Square or Jones Ave. (which is tentatively in the Metrolinx master plan), it will be interesting to see just how fast South Riverdale, Blake-Jones and Leslieville gentrify. I think they would, particularly given that housing prices around already seem awfully inflated! I'd like to see that, as I would definitely benefit from it, and I think it would actually help overall subway crowding just about as much as the Downtown Relief Line, but at a much, much lower cost.
I'm not entirely sure how many middle class people (aside from us) shop at Gerrard Square but surely some. I've certainly seen quite a few clashes at the mall over people with different backgrounds and ideas of what is proper. I was so disappointed to hear this white man to say some really horrible things about Asian drivers while his young son was right there. Do I understand that he is resentful of all this competition from immigrants when his economic position appears to be really precarious? Sure, but I don't approve. Still, it is fairly easy to criticize when I am on the sidelines. I am not threatened by low- or medium-skilled migrants coming to Canada. While there are obviously some drawbacks to community cohesion, on the whole I am in favour of mass migration (provided there are some ground rules about what is not acceptable behaviour in Canada), though of course I would say that being a high-skilled migrant myself (who slipped in just before another round of rule changes to the immigration laws).
One bit of cultural clash that would be interesting to explore (that Walker only has hinted at so far) is how the folks living near me are largely, though not entirely, workaholics and there is a different relationship to work south of the tracks. Some of the workers work extremely hard at precarious jobs (and this may be the most true of the migrants who are "only" permanent residents and have almost no access to Canada's social safety net), but work still doesn't seem to define their identity the way it can for certain skilled workers. I would say on the whole there is a bit more casualness towards work on the south side. (And this may well be a healthier perspective or at least reflect a more realistic attitude as to how much any particular worker is actually valued (or needed) by a corporation. It's just not a perspective I seem to be able to adopt. I may come back to this point when I write about Machado de Assis's novels in a future blog.)
As a good example, we had planned to go to a mobile phone store and finally get my wife switched over to a new service and a new smart phone. The store wasn't scheduled to open until 11, so we walked around the block and waited outside. There was absolutely no indication that anyone was inside getting ready to open up. I even called the store number, and the call went to a number that did not have an active voice mailbox, so I couldn't even leave a message. We waited 10 or so minutes and then went home. It's very possible that the employee turned up at 11:30. He was almost certainly there by noon, but it is too late. This casualness has cost him a sale, since we will now deal with the mobile company over at the Eaton Centre tomorrow. It's this frisson between different expectations of how to behave and what is "reasonable" or "proper" that are actually quite interesting. I might explore this just a bit in this short piece I am working on for the next Sing-for-Your-Supper, though this would be a case where only one of the characters is "slumming," trying to hang out with the cool kids who are actually from a lower social class. For the most part I find it easier to write when everyone in the play is from roughly the same class position, though I do find myself exploring when people come from different ethnic backgrounds. I don't know how successful I actually am at this (I'll elicit more feedback later), but it is something I have tackled 3 times now. I don't know that I am ready yet to write a piece which features major class divides as well as racial or ethnic divides, but I will probably get there someday.
Certainly the broader neighbourhood (5 or so blocks in all directions) should provide some terrific source material. In addition to our mobile phone "saga," there are some very interesting stories about parents who manage to get their kids anchored into a particular school and then move quite a distance away where the rent is cheaper. I found that this was a technique pretty common in Chicago, and I guess I admire parents for exploring/exploiting the same loopholes here, perhaps because in Toronto, unless Chicago, it seems to be migrant families who do take more advantage of this, i.e. this isn't simply some other way that middle class white families exploit their cultural capital to work the system, the way it was in Chicago. I shouldn't complain too much, as we benefited from the system in Chicago, though in our case we only moved a short distance away but wanted to stay in the same school. In Toronto, just as in Chicago, the school catchment areas are quite irregular and even a bit perverse in some neighbourhoods.
I haven't spent enough time at the Community Centre to have any interesting tales there, but I may find out more from my kids who are enrolled in some sports there. While I am recycling this picture, I think it is a classic one, showing just how few kids came out to celebrate the Christmas holiday whereas in Vancouver (and presumably at least some other Toronto centres) these pancake breakfasts were packed. I call this picture "The Loneliest Santa."
Edit to add: I actually forgot how much drama there can be at these grocery stores. Most of the clashes at the Food Basics are in the parking lot, while No Frills has plenty of parking, but seems to serve a slightly wider range of customers (class-wise at any rate). I've seen some really ugly interactions at the cash registers, particularly when there is a frustrated middle class customer treating the cashiers badly. It just seems to me that everyone is more on edge than they used to be and certainly a lot of the vaunted Canadian "niceness" has been somewhat worn away. There certainly are not that many novels set in supermarkets, though there are a few set in small stores or delis (maybe Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is the best known early example). There is a whole string of contemporary novels with a scene here or there set in a store as part of a larger commentary on consumerism (DeLillo's White Noise is the exemplar but also Ballard's Kingdom Come and of course some of the stories by Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver -- "A Small, Good Thing" obviously). The one quite recent novel that kind of gets at what I am contemplating at the moment is The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavić, which despite its title only has a relatively few scenes set in or actually outside a supermarket, but they are quite interesting because of various cultural clashes. I've been meaning to review this for a while, so I guess I will just go ahead and do that now.
Thinning the collections
In the case of my books, it is a very slow process, though I have the equivalent of 4 shelves of books that I expect to part with after I actually read each one. Sometimes there are surprises, and I hang onto a book after all, or I get rid of a book that is from my main bookcases (the last one I recall is Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, but I'm sure there were others and there will be more in the future). Normally, I simply donate these to the library (for sale, though if it is fairly rare I offer it up to Robarts and they actually took 4 which should make their way into their collections -- so cool), but if the books are in particularly good shape I sell them at BMV. I feel slightly more in control than I described the situation here, but I still have an absurd number of books in the house.
I've had a lot of success selling pop/rock and jazz CDs at BMV, though probably for slightly less than I would get elsewhere. I'm not quite sure what to do about the classical. I thought I had found a place, but I've been given the runaround (usually the owner says they don't have enough cash after paying the rent and I should call back in a few weeks!) and the same thing happened yesterday. I'm pretty tired of this, so I'll take one more look through the options and take them someplace else. BMV would probably take them, but I'd like a bit more money for them. I've found that trying to sell on Amazon.ca just isn't panning out that well, but the shipping costs to the U.S. are such that I simply can't afford to sell on Amazon.com unfortunately.
There is a book sale at the school and I am donating just a few adult books,* but we are taking the opportunity to go through the kids' books, primarily the books for younger readers, which are in my daughter's room. It was interesting watching her decide which books she was done with. I think she hung onto quite a few mostly because she remembered our reading time together or in other cases she just isn't ready to give them up and effectively give up on her childhood, essentially moving up into the preteen slot. Yet when we get books from the library, she is usually looking for longer, more challenging books, and she often likes reading non-fiction books, particularly on science. I should probably remember that on my (very frequent!) trips to the library. She's actually becoming quite a good reader, though her spelling isn't as good as her brother's. (While overall we do prefer the school system in Toronto to than in Vancouver, our son's teacher in Vancouver did have a more rigorous approach to spelling with regular quizzes. Teaching spelling seems a bit more haphazard in Toronto, but with a greater emphasis on math, which is an acceptable trade-off in my view. I know we should be doing more at home with her on spelling, though I am already spending a fair bit of time practicing French and math, and fortunately she is enjoying math.) To return to the main topic, I didn't purge quite as many books as I had hoped, but it's a start.
* Books primarily aimed at adults. Get your mind out of the gutter...
I've had a lot of success selling pop/rock and jazz CDs at BMV, though probably for slightly less than I would get elsewhere. I'm not quite sure what to do about the classical. I thought I had found a place, but I've been given the runaround (usually the owner says they don't have enough cash after paying the rent and I should call back in a few weeks!) and the same thing happened yesterday. I'm pretty tired of this, so I'll take one more look through the options and take them someplace else. BMV would probably take them, but I'd like a bit more money for them. I've found that trying to sell on Amazon.ca just isn't panning out that well, but the shipping costs to the U.S. are such that I simply can't afford to sell on Amazon.com unfortunately.
There is a book sale at the school and I am donating just a few adult books,* but we are taking the opportunity to go through the kids' books, primarily the books for younger readers, which are in my daughter's room. It was interesting watching her decide which books she was done with. I think she hung onto quite a few mostly because she remembered our reading time together or in other cases she just isn't ready to give them up and effectively give up on her childhood, essentially moving up into the preteen slot. Yet when we get books from the library, she is usually looking for longer, more challenging books, and she often likes reading non-fiction books, particularly on science. I should probably remember that on my (very frequent!) trips to the library. She's actually becoming quite a good reader, though her spelling isn't as good as her brother's. (While overall we do prefer the school system in Toronto to than in Vancouver, our son's teacher in Vancouver did have a more rigorous approach to spelling with regular quizzes. Teaching spelling seems a bit more haphazard in Toronto, but with a greater emphasis on math, which is an acceptable trade-off in my view. I know we should be doing more at home with her on spelling, though I am already spending a fair bit of time practicing French and math, and fortunately she is enjoying math.) To return to the main topic, I didn't purge quite as many books as I had hoped, but it's a start.
* Books primarily aimed at adults. Get your mind out of the gutter...
Friday, October 16, 2015
George F. Walker - Canadian Dramatist
George F. Walker is one of the most successful Canadian playwrights. He is somewhat known outside of Canada (probably more than any other Canadian playwright writing in English, though that isn't saying much). I had actually seen one of his plays, Beautiful City, in Chicago, though I have to say that was not the best introduction to his work. The production itself was pretty sloppy, and the plot features a self-identified witch, who may or may not have actual psychic powers. After seeing this, I'd say I was still vaguely interested in his work, but he wasn't really on my radar as a must-see playwright.
It's hard to say when this actually turned around to the point where I go out of my way to see his work. I have actually managed to catch almost all his recent work (where living in Toronto really pays off). I'm fairly sure that I picked up my copy of Suburban Motel in a Vancouver thrift shop (Wildlife Thrift on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver) right after I moved to Vancouver. Of course, I might be wrong, and I bought it at the occasional book sale held at the Vancouver Public Library. I might have gotten it elsewhere (even Chicago) but Vancouver seems far more likely.
There probably were a few other opportunities to see his plays in Chicago, but I can't really recall. I do sort of remember there was an opportunity to see 3 of the Suburban Motel plays either in Chicago or Vancouver, but I passed for some reason. Either the location was subpar or I wasn't sure why they had picked those particular 3 out of the 6.
After about a year living in Vancouver, I did have an opportunity to see all 6 of the Suburban Motel plays during the Vancouver Fringe, where they were being produced at the Waldorf Hotel. I'm having a bit of trouble reconstructing my mental reasoning of why I didn't go, since in retrospect I am totally kicking myself. (I actually was hardly blogging at all at this point, just book reviews really).
As best as I can recall, these were my reasons: Number one -- I had only seen one so-so production of one of his lesser plays. I still hadn't seen some of the terrific productions I have seen of his work here in Toronto where they really got the balance right between the humour and the violence. Number two -- the productions actually took place in various hotel rooms and the seating was incredibly limited, and it sounded just a bit too claustrophobic for me. Number three -- the timing was not ideal. Had this happened in July or August, I would absolutely have seen it,* but my family was back from a long stay in Chicago and frankly they weren't adjusting very well to Vancouver (ultimately we decided to uproot and move to Toronto). That's how bad Vancouver was for us. (Nonetheless, it was the right move, since TransLink really became a very different and much worse place to work less than a year after I left. After all, the job had been, for me, the main positive of being in Vancouver, and it certainly wouldn't have been worth sticking it out once things went south at TransLink.) So it just wouldn't have been a great idea to boogie off for a couple of evenings to see all these plays when things were fairly tense at home. Still, a major lost opportunity. I saw that this past spring Edmonton was lucky enough to get a full run of Suburban Motel right before theatre C103 closed its doors, and that would have been cool, but not worth traveling just for that. I figure if I wait long enough someone will try to remount the whole series here in Toronto.
Anyway what really turned things around was seeing a very good production of Escape from Happiness at Alumnae Theatre, relatively soon after moving to Toronto. I've written about that production here, including how I really wanted to see Better Living (and I still do). I would really have liked to see Better Living followed by Escape from Happiness with the same cast. I guess that is the sort of thing one could attempt if one had a theatre company... I did see the actor who played the semi-comatose father turn up again in We the Family, which was sort of an amusing echo of Escape from Happiness.
After that, I was basically primed to catch Walker's plays, and there was a good production of Problem Child at the Red Sandcastle Theatre. I felt that I finally was getting a handle on Walker's dark humour** and his take on working class characters. I saw a double bill at Theatre Passe Muraille of two of his plays about urban education (Parents Night and The Bigger Issue), and then just a few weeks ago I saw We the Family at Hart House.
I also was at a talk Walker gave at Hart House where he mentioned that the middle class has become so insecure throughout North America that they have kind of fallen down into his area of interest. (He's not a playwright that generally cared to write about the elite (unlike say Daniel MacIvor), although there are a few rich characters in his work, often serving as targets of his ire.) I think he has started to take public education seriously as an area where children of different social classes do interact (often a bit more easily than their wary parents would have it) and the general increase in angst among middle-class parents is definitely a rich field to explore.
He also encouraged people in the theatre to get some real-world experience outside the theatre and to talk about things outside of theatre. So many plays are really in conversation with other plays, and not with reality. This echoed something John Patrick Shanley said about how film-makers are mostly talking to other film-makers and not the audience when they make their films.
Walker does recycle a few things in his talks, particularly how he finds it so strange that people object to the swearing. He discussed that for a bit at Hart House, as well as when he was in Ottawa promoting The Burden of Self Awareness, which has apparently not had an opening in Toronto.
Walker also dwelt on the idea that in general he didn't want to make art about working class people for rich people to ogle at or, even worse, to treat as a kind of anthropology project. That was one reason he generally worked with smaller theatres and start-ups. At the same time, he was aware that even cheap tickets weren't always going to be enough to allow working-class people to go to the theatre, as their time budgets were so tight to say nothing of possibly having to arrange child care and so forth. There is a reason that the arts are still the preserve of the middle and upper classes. But he didn't have to be happy about the situation and the contradictions in his own life.
I think the one aspect of the discussion that troubled me is that Walker still assumes he can look at a working-class neighbourhood and understand how life is like there, since he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood (Leslieville, not all that far from where we lived last year). There is some truth to that. Many of the kids will go down the path of not caring very much for or about education and will take a variety of dead-end jobs and their tension over their precarious economic (and social) status will spill over into their family life. But what is new in Canada -- and Walker is only haltingly addressing this -- is that the ethnic and religious differences are much greater than they used to be. Walker notes that, in his day, there were tensions between Italians and Irish and Jews due to differences that were blown out of proportion by some of the gang ringleaders. I would argue that the grounds for mutual understanding are narrower today and the opportunities for misunderstanding are much greater in multicultural Canada. That may make for powerful theatre or novels (both investigating the sources of tension and then how this is overcome or not at the personal and neighbourhood level), but it is relatively unexplored at the moment, even in Walker's work.
Of course, sometimes his particular sensibilities don't quite come across well. He does have a tendency to write somewhat cartoonish characters, particularly his villains, who are often drawn from the corporate elite. It takes a strong cast to pull this off, particularly if we are supposed to have any sympathy for characters that have just been acting violently or at least threatening violence. There is often a lot of chaos in his scripts, and that is not always focused or channeled that well in lesser productions. Still, there is enough of interest that I will general seek out new productions of his work, hoping for the best.
So for now, I'll just end with a list of the many, many plays George F. Walker has written and had produced. I will keep track of whether I have seen them in a live production (with a P), I have read the play (with an R) or merely own a copy (with an O). So ideally I would get to the point where many of these are marked as "PRO," though that certainly isn't the case at the moment. I'd say in terms of interest level, I'm most interested in trying to catch Walker's latest, The Crowd, followed by the rest of the Suburban Motel series, and then Better Living. While I don't imagine there will be a remount of And So It Goes in the near future, I'll keep an eye out just in case, since this interview indicates it is sort of the turning point of a slightly more serene style for Walker, though Dead Metaphor was a bit of a throw-back, triggered by his anger at the Tea Party types that had seemingly invaded Canada on top of mucking things up down South.
Plays by George F. Walker
Prince of Naples (1971)
Ambush at Tether's End (1971)
Sacktown Rag (1972)
Bagdad Saloon (1973)
O Beyond Mozambique (1974)
Ramona and the White Slaves (1976)
Gossip (1977)
O Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline (1977)
P Filthy Rich (1979)
Rumors of Our Death (1980)
O Theatre of the Film Noir (1981)
R Science and Madness (1982)
The Art of War (1983)
O Criminals in Love (1984)
O Better Living (1986)
PO Beautiful City (1987)
O Nothing Sacred (1988)
O Love and Anger (1989)
PO Escape from Happiness (1991)
O Tough! (1993)
Suburban Motel (1997):
PO Problem Child
O Criminal Genius
PO Risk Everything
O Adult Entertainment
O Featuring Loretta
O The End of Civilization
Heaven (2000)
And So It Goes... (2010)
King of Thieves (2010)
Dead Metaphor (2013)
The Burden of Self Awareness (2014)
The Ravine (2014)
P Parents Night (2014)
P The Bigger Issue (2015)
P We the Family (2015)
The Crowd (2016)
P The Damage Done (2016)
* If the cycle had been playing after I had gotten more familiar with his work, I'm sure I would have gone anyway, despite the tension in the air. As I said, just bad timing all the way around.
** He actually talks about this aspect of his work in this interview, which also gives his reasoning for working with smaller companies and sometimes premiering his work with small companies or even university drama societies. As it happens, I was not even in the GTA when The Ravine premiered down in Niagara. I'm not sure I would have made it down to Niagara in March anyway, but perhaps. After all, I am seriously considering going to Peterborough in February to catch a Tremblay play.
It's hard to say when this actually turned around to the point where I go out of my way to see his work. I have actually managed to catch almost all his recent work (where living in Toronto really pays off). I'm fairly sure that I picked up my copy of Suburban Motel in a Vancouver thrift shop (Wildlife Thrift on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver) right after I moved to Vancouver. Of course, I might be wrong, and I bought it at the occasional book sale held at the Vancouver Public Library. I might have gotten it elsewhere (even Chicago) but Vancouver seems far more likely.
There probably were a few other opportunities to see his plays in Chicago, but I can't really recall. I do sort of remember there was an opportunity to see 3 of the Suburban Motel plays either in Chicago or Vancouver, but I passed for some reason. Either the location was subpar or I wasn't sure why they had picked those particular 3 out of the 6.
After about a year living in Vancouver, I did have an opportunity to see all 6 of the Suburban Motel plays during the Vancouver Fringe, where they were being produced at the Waldorf Hotel. I'm having a bit of trouble reconstructing my mental reasoning of why I didn't go, since in retrospect I am totally kicking myself. (I actually was hardly blogging at all at this point, just book reviews really).
As best as I can recall, these were my reasons: Number one -- I had only seen one so-so production of one of his lesser plays. I still hadn't seen some of the terrific productions I have seen of his work here in Toronto where they really got the balance right between the humour and the violence. Number two -- the productions actually took place in various hotel rooms and the seating was incredibly limited, and it sounded just a bit too claustrophobic for me. Number three -- the timing was not ideal. Had this happened in July or August, I would absolutely have seen it,* but my family was back from a long stay in Chicago and frankly they weren't adjusting very well to Vancouver (ultimately we decided to uproot and move to Toronto). That's how bad Vancouver was for us. (Nonetheless, it was the right move, since TransLink really became a very different and much worse place to work less than a year after I left. After all, the job had been, for me, the main positive of being in Vancouver, and it certainly wouldn't have been worth sticking it out once things went south at TransLink.) So it just wouldn't have been a great idea to boogie off for a couple of evenings to see all these plays when things were fairly tense at home. Still, a major lost opportunity. I saw that this past spring Edmonton was lucky enough to get a full run of Suburban Motel right before theatre C103 closed its doors, and that would have been cool, but not worth traveling just for that. I figure if I wait long enough someone will try to remount the whole series here in Toronto.
Anyway what really turned things around was seeing a very good production of Escape from Happiness at Alumnae Theatre, relatively soon after moving to Toronto. I've written about that production here, including how I really wanted to see Better Living (and I still do). I would really have liked to see Better Living followed by Escape from Happiness with the same cast. I guess that is the sort of thing one could attempt if one had a theatre company... I did see the actor who played the semi-comatose father turn up again in We the Family, which was sort of an amusing echo of Escape from Happiness.
After that, I was basically primed to catch Walker's plays, and there was a good production of Problem Child at the Red Sandcastle Theatre. I felt that I finally was getting a handle on Walker's dark humour** and his take on working class characters. I saw a double bill at Theatre Passe Muraille of two of his plays about urban education (Parents Night and The Bigger Issue), and then just a few weeks ago I saw We the Family at Hart House.
I also was at a talk Walker gave at Hart House where he mentioned that the middle class has become so insecure throughout North America that they have kind of fallen down into his area of interest. (He's not a playwright that generally cared to write about the elite (unlike say Daniel MacIvor), although there are a few rich characters in his work, often serving as targets of his ire.) I think he has started to take public education seriously as an area where children of different social classes do interact (often a bit more easily than their wary parents would have it) and the general increase in angst among middle-class parents is definitely a rich field to explore.
He also encouraged people in the theatre to get some real-world experience outside the theatre and to talk about things outside of theatre. So many plays are really in conversation with other plays, and not with reality. This echoed something John Patrick Shanley said about how film-makers are mostly talking to other film-makers and not the audience when they make their films.
Walker does recycle a few things in his talks, particularly how he finds it so strange that people object to the swearing. He discussed that for a bit at Hart House, as well as when he was in Ottawa promoting The Burden of Self Awareness, which has apparently not had an opening in Toronto.
Walker also dwelt on the idea that in general he didn't want to make art about working class people for rich people to ogle at or, even worse, to treat as a kind of anthropology project. That was one reason he generally worked with smaller theatres and start-ups. At the same time, he was aware that even cheap tickets weren't always going to be enough to allow working-class people to go to the theatre, as their time budgets were so tight to say nothing of possibly having to arrange child care and so forth. There is a reason that the arts are still the preserve of the middle and upper classes. But he didn't have to be happy about the situation and the contradictions in his own life.
I think the one aspect of the discussion that troubled me is that Walker still assumes he can look at a working-class neighbourhood and understand how life is like there, since he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood (Leslieville, not all that far from where we lived last year). There is some truth to that. Many of the kids will go down the path of not caring very much for or about education and will take a variety of dead-end jobs and their tension over their precarious economic (and social) status will spill over into their family life. But what is new in Canada -- and Walker is only haltingly addressing this -- is that the ethnic and religious differences are much greater than they used to be. Walker notes that, in his day, there were tensions between Italians and Irish and Jews due to differences that were blown out of proportion by some of the gang ringleaders. I would argue that the grounds for mutual understanding are narrower today and the opportunities for misunderstanding are much greater in multicultural Canada. That may make for powerful theatre or novels (both investigating the sources of tension and then how this is overcome or not at the personal and neighbourhood level), but it is relatively unexplored at the moment, even in Walker's work.
Of course, sometimes his particular sensibilities don't quite come across well. He does have a tendency to write somewhat cartoonish characters, particularly his villains, who are often drawn from the corporate elite. It takes a strong cast to pull this off, particularly if we are supposed to have any sympathy for characters that have just been acting violently or at least threatening violence. There is often a lot of chaos in his scripts, and that is not always focused or channeled that well in lesser productions. Still, there is enough of interest that I will general seek out new productions of his work, hoping for the best.
So for now, I'll just end with a list of the many, many plays George F. Walker has written and had produced. I will keep track of whether I have seen them in a live production (with a P), I have read the play (with an R) or merely own a copy (with an O). So ideally I would get to the point where many of these are marked as "PRO," though that certainly isn't the case at the moment. I'd say in terms of interest level, I'm most interested in trying to catch Walker's latest, The Crowd, followed by the rest of the Suburban Motel series, and then Better Living. While I don't imagine there will be a remount of And So It Goes in the near future, I'll keep an eye out just in case, since this interview indicates it is sort of the turning point of a slightly more serene style for Walker, though Dead Metaphor was a bit of a throw-back, triggered by his anger at the Tea Party types that had seemingly invaded Canada on top of mucking things up down South.
Plays by George F. Walker
Prince of Naples (1971)
Ambush at Tether's End (1971)
Sacktown Rag (1972)
Bagdad Saloon (1973)
O Beyond Mozambique (1974)
Ramona and the White Slaves (1976)
Gossip (1977)
O Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline (1977)
P Filthy Rich (1979)
Rumors of Our Death (1980)
O Theatre of the Film Noir (1981)
R Science and Madness (1982)
The Art of War (1983)
O Criminals in Love (1984)
O Better Living (1986)
PO Beautiful City (1987)
O Nothing Sacred (1988)
O Love and Anger (1989)
PO Escape from Happiness (1991)
O Tough! (1993)
Suburban Motel (1997):
PO Problem Child
O Criminal Genius
PO Risk Everything
O Adult Entertainment
O Featuring Loretta
O The End of Civilization
Heaven (2000)
And So It Goes... (2010)
King of Thieves (2010)
Dead Metaphor (2013)
The Burden of Self Awareness (2014)
The Ravine (2014)
P Parents Night (2014)
P The Bigger Issue (2015)
P We the Family (2015)
The Crowd (2016)
P The Damage Done (2016)
* If the cycle had been playing after I had gotten more familiar with his work, I'm sure I would have gone anyway, despite the tension in the air. As I said, just bad timing all the way around.
** He actually talks about this aspect of his work in this interview, which also gives his reasoning for working with smaller companies and sometimes premiering his work with small companies or even university drama societies. As it happens, I was not even in the GTA when The Ravine premiered down in Niagara. I'm not sure I would have made it down to Niagara in March anyway, but perhaps. After all, I am seriously considering going to Peterborough in February to catch a Tremblay play.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Up and Down Day
Yesterday (Wed.) was so odd. I had a few highs and several lows, and I'm still not entirely sure how to rate the day.
I'm still smarting a bit over having to cancel the trip to Ottawa. I was able to schedule something for mid-November. I was in the middle of pulling the trigger when Porter pulled my tickets and repriced them, so I had to start all over again with a different configuration. We'll fly into Ottawa on Friday and then take the train back on Sunday, with a 4 hour layover in Kington to check that city out a little bit as well. I hope it will be fun.
Anyway, that means we won't be heading to Cleveland or Detroit to do any of the things I had been counting on. I can probably live without Detroit for the time being, though I sure wish there was some easy way to get there. I am really bummed about not getting to the garden show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's actually a pretty big deal, including the first time since 1980 that all 3 of Monet's huge Waterlilies painting will be displayed together. I'll come back to this towards the end of the post.
I have been fairly happy about getting through a number of shorter novels. I realize it isn't that big of an accomplishment, but I do enjoy checking them off my very long list. I will say that I basically hated After Claude, and Epitaph of a Small Winner made me a bit melancholy. The latter is definitely a book that makes you take stock of your life and whether you have achieved much of anything, or indeed if all human achievement is vanity, vanity, all is vanity... I'll probably circle back around to this theme in a few more days.
Work had its typical ups and downs. I guess on balance it was slightly positive. I was happy that the weather broke and I was able to ride my bike. Or rather I was pleased about that until the very last stretch homing home on Carlaw where an extremely aggressive driver was trying to pass another car on a stretch that is not designed for it and basically ran me off the road. I was so upset over this that I simply gave up on my plan to go swimming, so that was certainly a major negative.
I've finally accepted that I won't lose weight given my current lifestyle (too many late nights and only biking as exercise) but I haven't moved into the next phase of actually changing this lifestyle. Going swimming more often would help, though the hours available for lap swimming at Matty Eckler are pretty lousy. So I'll pretty much have to wait until next week, though I could investigate their weight room and see what other exercise options I have at home. As I said, I haven't committed to making this change.
Another major downer is that my wife's laptop has died completely with no warning. I just don't want to have to deal with these sorts of things. Anyway, about the only positive is that I almost never used it, so don't have files that got lost forever, and even she didn't have much on there. Mostly photos that were already backed up. I already tried one thing to resurrect it, though that didn't work, so I guess I'll be laptop shopping over the weekend.
I should say up front, I am not a sports fan at all (basketball being the only one I have any patience to watch and even that only for maybe a quarter at most), but I do like to know the final scores as the different sports come into their payoffs. Obviously, it is pretty huge that the Cubs have gone from being the second seed to competing for the NL pennant. And what can one say about the Jays? I was sure they were done after they lost their first two home games., but they certainly surprised me. I didn't see any of the game through the 7th inning (it's probably just as well, since I disagreed with the crazy rule that kicked in and scored a run on dead ball). I also missed Bautista's home run (and bat flip), though I certainly saw it on the replays. I did see the Jay's closer get his last five outs and that was awfully impressive to me. So that's all exciting, and I'm glad the Jays are still in it. I sort of shudder to think about a Jays-Cubs World Series, as so little work will get done in the Midwest.
One more significant downer is that someone had recommended this Quebec TV series to me (Serie Noire) and they had the DVD at the library. It turns out it does not have subtitles at all. What gives?! This was put together with Radio Canada funds, and they think it is acceptable to only put it out in French? We all know that the Quebecois would raise holy hell if it was the other way around (as they have done time and time again). I just think it is so typical of the Quebecois and their one-way language laws, and certainly the main reason the ROC (rest of Canada) has so little patience for them. Making it even worse is that Netflix has these episodes with English subtitles, but I am certainly not going to pay to see episodes that I already supported through public funding. So that was actually quite upsetting to me, and I have decided I will act as if this series never even existed.
I guess on the positive side, the latest polls are looking promising for a Liberal minority government, propped up by the NDP. That might result in some decent policies, and repealing a lot of the really crappy laws that Harper passed in the last 3 or 4 years. Ideally, they will even agree on some electoral reform that will more or less doom the Conservatives to third party status forever. Still, nothing gets settled until Oct. 19. (I'll probably have to arrange something to do to keep my mind off of the election...)
The last major downer (though this is more of a projected future downer) is that I decided I really ought to try to get to Cleveland to see this art show, even though I would probably be going by myself. It is unbelievably difficult to get to Cleveland from Toronto. There are no direct flights at all (and Porter flies nowhere near there). So the fastest you can fly there is 4.5 hours, whereas you could drive it in 5.5 hours, though that assumes no problems at the border. I also started looking into buses and trains. The train option is absurd. Not only do they schedule a full 2 hours at the border, the train is routinely an hour late leaving Buffalo. Then the train from Buffalo to Cleveland only runs once a day, and you have to board it in the middle of the night. Doing a direct bus to Cleveland is still about 8 hours, which is pretty ridiculous, though on the whole the bus companies have a much more realistic view of the border crossing times (generally about 30 minutes whereas in a car it can range from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours if it is a holiday!). I think that means for the foreseeable future, my daughter is not going to be coming with me to Buffalo and probably for the sake of avoiding any major domestic scenes my son won't be going either (plus who wants to answer to the border guards why you are travelling with a child without the second parent?). Given that there is also an interesting show at the Albright-Knox, I might see about setting up a weekend where I travel to Buffalo in the morning, go to the Albright-Knox, come back to catch a Greyhound to Cleveland, stay overnight, see the exhibit in Cleveland and then travel back to Toronto in the evening. It is doable, though a bit crazy. It also depends a lot on the weather not turning bad on me in December. I have to decide if this really is worth it, or I should just file it away with various other half-baked ideas I often have.
So anyway, that was my topsy-turvy day. (Thinking it over, the dead laptop definitely pushes this into a net negative day.) Unfortunately, I have now taken a bit too much of the morning writing this, so this day starts off kind of badly as well, but I should be able to recover. Anyway, I'll have to see how things turn out tonight, though I hopefully won't have quite so many ups and downs (and hopefully more positives than negatives to dwell upon).
Coda: I had just the weirdest dream last night where I was at a large library that was basically a music library and they were having small ensembles play different pieces in various wings of the library. Apparently I worked there, and there was some major initiative on to recycle old books into something else. I can't recall what it was now, but it made sense at the time. (Note: I did work at libraries up through the end of my undergrad years but not since then.) I had an odd discussion with a co-worker, and apparently I was responsible for this co-worker leaving. While I felt bad about it, this freed up an opening for a friend of mine, whom I started recruiting right away. The dream ended before any personnel changes were actually made.
How do you tell someone you dreamed you made them quit their job (or be fired)? Answer: you don't...
I'm still smarting a bit over having to cancel the trip to Ottawa. I was able to schedule something for mid-November. I was in the middle of pulling the trigger when Porter pulled my tickets and repriced them, so I had to start all over again with a different configuration. We'll fly into Ottawa on Friday and then take the train back on Sunday, with a 4 hour layover in Kington to check that city out a little bit as well. I hope it will be fun.
Anyway, that means we won't be heading to Cleveland or Detroit to do any of the things I had been counting on. I can probably live without Detroit for the time being, though I sure wish there was some easy way to get there. I am really bummed about not getting to the garden show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's actually a pretty big deal, including the first time since 1980 that all 3 of Monet's huge Waterlilies painting will be displayed together. I'll come back to this towards the end of the post.
I have been fairly happy about getting through a number of shorter novels. I realize it isn't that big of an accomplishment, but I do enjoy checking them off my very long list. I will say that I basically hated After Claude, and Epitaph of a Small Winner made me a bit melancholy. The latter is definitely a book that makes you take stock of your life and whether you have achieved much of anything, or indeed if all human achievement is vanity, vanity, all is vanity... I'll probably circle back around to this theme in a few more days.
Work had its typical ups and downs. I guess on balance it was slightly positive. I was happy that the weather broke and I was able to ride my bike. Or rather I was pleased about that until the very last stretch homing home on Carlaw where an extremely aggressive driver was trying to pass another car on a stretch that is not designed for it and basically ran me off the road. I was so upset over this that I simply gave up on my plan to go swimming, so that was certainly a major negative.
I've finally accepted that I won't lose weight given my current lifestyle (too many late nights and only biking as exercise) but I haven't moved into the next phase of actually changing this lifestyle. Going swimming more often would help, though the hours available for lap swimming at Matty Eckler are pretty lousy. So I'll pretty much have to wait until next week, though I could investigate their weight room and see what other exercise options I have at home. As I said, I haven't committed to making this change.
Another major downer is that my wife's laptop has died completely with no warning. I just don't want to have to deal with these sorts of things. Anyway, about the only positive is that I almost never used it, so don't have files that got lost forever, and even she didn't have much on there. Mostly photos that were already backed up. I already tried one thing to resurrect it, though that didn't work, so I guess I'll be laptop shopping over the weekend.
I should say up front, I am not a sports fan at all (basketball being the only one I have any patience to watch and even that only for maybe a quarter at most), but I do like to know the final scores as the different sports come into their payoffs. Obviously, it is pretty huge that the Cubs have gone from being the second seed to competing for the NL pennant. And what can one say about the Jays? I was sure they were done after they lost their first two home games., but they certainly surprised me. I didn't see any of the game through the 7th inning (it's probably just as well, since I disagreed with the crazy rule that kicked in and scored a run on dead ball). I also missed Bautista's home run (and bat flip), though I certainly saw it on the replays. I did see the Jay's closer get his last five outs and that was awfully impressive to me. So that's all exciting, and I'm glad the Jays are still in it. I sort of shudder to think about a Jays-Cubs World Series, as so little work will get done in the Midwest.
One more significant downer is that someone had recommended this Quebec TV series to me (Serie Noire) and they had the DVD at the library. It turns out it does not have subtitles at all. What gives?! This was put together with Radio Canada funds, and they think it is acceptable to only put it out in French? We all know that the Quebecois would raise holy hell if it was the other way around (as they have done time and time again). I just think it is so typical of the Quebecois and their one-way language laws, and certainly the main reason the ROC (rest of Canada) has so little patience for them. Making it even worse is that Netflix has these episodes with English subtitles, but I am certainly not going to pay to see episodes that I already supported through public funding. So that was actually quite upsetting to me, and I have decided I will act as if this series never even existed.
I guess on the positive side, the latest polls are looking promising for a Liberal minority government, propped up by the NDP. That might result in some decent policies, and repealing a lot of the really crappy laws that Harper passed in the last 3 or 4 years. Ideally, they will even agree on some electoral reform that will more or less doom the Conservatives to third party status forever. Still, nothing gets settled until Oct. 19. (I'll probably have to arrange something to do to keep my mind off of the election...)
The last major downer (though this is more of a projected future downer) is that I decided I really ought to try to get to Cleveland to see this art show, even though I would probably be going by myself. It is unbelievably difficult to get to Cleveland from Toronto. There are no direct flights at all (and Porter flies nowhere near there). So the fastest you can fly there is 4.5 hours, whereas you could drive it in 5.5 hours, though that assumes no problems at the border. I also started looking into buses and trains. The train option is absurd. Not only do they schedule a full 2 hours at the border, the train is routinely an hour late leaving Buffalo. Then the train from Buffalo to Cleveland only runs once a day, and you have to board it in the middle of the night. Doing a direct bus to Cleveland is still about 8 hours, which is pretty ridiculous, though on the whole the bus companies have a much more realistic view of the border crossing times (generally about 30 minutes whereas in a car it can range from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours if it is a holiday!). I think that means for the foreseeable future, my daughter is not going to be coming with me to Buffalo and probably for the sake of avoiding any major domestic scenes my son won't be going either (plus who wants to answer to the border guards why you are travelling with a child without the second parent?). Given that there is also an interesting show at the Albright-Knox, I might see about setting up a weekend where I travel to Buffalo in the morning, go to the Albright-Knox, come back to catch a Greyhound to Cleveland, stay overnight, see the exhibit in Cleveland and then travel back to Toronto in the evening. It is doable, though a bit crazy. It also depends a lot on the weather not turning bad on me in December. I have to decide if this really is worth it, or I should just file it away with various other half-baked ideas I often have.
So anyway, that was my topsy-turvy day. (Thinking it over, the dead laptop definitely pushes this into a net negative day.) Unfortunately, I have now taken a bit too much of the morning writing this, so this day starts off kind of badly as well, but I should be able to recover. Anyway, I'll have to see how things turn out tonight, though I hopefully won't have quite so many ups and downs (and hopefully more positives than negatives to dwell upon).
Coda: I had just the weirdest dream last night where I was at a large library that was basically a music library and they were having small ensembles play different pieces in various wings of the library. Apparently I worked there, and there was some major initiative on to recycle old books into something else. I can't recall what it was now, but it made sense at the time. (Note: I did work at libraries up through the end of my undergrad years but not since then.) I had an odd discussion with a co-worker, and apparently I was responsible for this co-worker leaving. While I felt bad about it, this freed up an opening for a friend of mine, whom I started recruiting right away. The dream ended before any personnel changes were actually made.
How do you tell someone you dreamed you made them quit their job (or be fired)? Answer: you don't...
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Hating characters
One advantage of not being in academia is that I can admit that I simply hate certain characters. That is so unsophisticated, but often our reactions to what we read are grounded in nothing more (or less) than we dislike key characters. It is fine to dislike the antagonists in a novel, but when the reader dislikes the main characters or cannot sympathize with (or even understand) the actions of the core characters, then problems set in. Sometimes the reader can appreciate a look into a world that "there but for the grace of God go I." Though personally I wonder whether this is just a form of literary slumming. I generally don't like books written by middle class authors about lower class characters (where these characters are front and center throughout the novel), since I just don't think you can avoid issues of misrepresentation. While I happen to think George Walker has really moved a long way from his working-class roots, he does have that grounding.
Even if one is sticking to novels that are about people in the same class, there is the issue of whether the reader can ever appreciate characters that act very differently than he or she would (or at least how the reader imagines him- or herself acting in those situations). So for instance, it is almost impossible for me to relate to stories where the main characters get drunk all the time or take boatloads of drugs -- or spend all their money stupidly like so many of the artistic types Barbara Comyns was writing about. I do consider it a minor moral failing to lose control to that extent, and mostly I find these kinds of stories boring. That is the main reason it took me so long to get around to reading any novels written by the Brat Pack. Now in the better novels, there is some ironic distancing where the main character knows he (usually its a male) is acting badly* but goes and does it anyway (and there may or may not be some underlying trauma that explains why they have been driven to drugs or what have you). This is seen not only in McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, but pretty much all the works by the Canadian author, Russell Smith. When I am in a good mood, I can read these stories with equanimity, since I know for sure I will never go down that rabbit hole. When I am in a bad mood, I find these characters weak and somewhat boring. I may dislike them to some extent, but I generally would not hate these characters just for being weak. (Though if the author is trying to hard to rope me into tolerating or even forgiving bad behaviour through the use of first-person or even second-person (!) narration, then I might be more resistant.**)
There is no question I don't like books about weak-spined characters, and I've written about that here to some extent. I found it a huge drag to read Maugham's Of Human Bondage and also Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl, which at least was shorter. I suppose in both those cases, I did hate the female characters that treated their erstwhile boyfriends so badly.
I definitely don't like characters that treat others badly, even if it is in a comic vein. As it turns out, I have written more than I remembered on such "detestable" characters. Here I am trying to focus on when it is the main character (that the reader identifies with by default) that is acting so badly. I have such mixed feelings about Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Ed from Vandergaeghe's My Present Age. They are complex, intelligent characters, but they just treat people so badly essentially because they are such egoists that nothing else ultimately matters but their own desires or intellectual hobby horses. Maybe I dislike them so much, since it is something I have to fight in my own life, only sometimes with success.
I actually stopped reading Donleavy's The Ginger Man, since in addition to being such an over-the-top egoist, the main character was a wife-beater. I simply could not countenance a supposedly comic novel with such a loathsome chracter at its heart. (He's way beyond the "zany" characters that I would avoid like the plague in real life but can somewhat tolerate in fictional form.) I've kind of blocked out major parts of Cassandra at the Wedding, but as I recall, Cassandra is driving across the country, trying to disrupt and ideally block her twin sister's wedding. I certainly didn't like her, but mostly I pitied her, since she was in the midst of some kind of mental breakdown apparently. I honestly can't remember the denouement of that novel, though I'm pretty sure the wedding did go on.
To add to this list, I have discovered perhaps another appalling character, perhaps just one notch below Sebastian of The Ginger Man: Harriet from Iris Owens' After Claude. She is a lazy, clingy sponger who is also mean-spirited towards her current and former friends. She clearly has something wrong with her mental facilities, since she thinks that her friend's problem with her crashing in her apartment is fundamentally due to sexual frustration, so she arranges for a stranger to come and try to rape her while she is sleeping (yes, this is actually a plot point, and she gets all upset when her intentions are "misunderstood"). She also is about to be thrown out of another apartment, by a fed-up "boyfriend," so arranges to have the locks changed and bars herself in for a while. I can't remember ever wanting harm to come to a major character as much as I did with her. I outright hated her, and I was glad that she was going to end up joining some creepy cult by the end of the novel. Good riddance. The whole novel upset me, and not really in a good way. I'm not at all surprised that in real life Iris Owens was an "interesting" but difficult woman who was not on speaking terms with a number of her former friends. Spare me from such intelligent and interesting people...
* Along those lines of being turned off by an author trying to seduce me into being complicit with bad behaviour, I will admit to being awfully alienated from the narrator of Adiga's The White Tiger and pretty much all of Mohsin Hamid's characters.
** Actually, there is another somewhat well-worn trope with authors making a main character deeply conservative, or even racist and/or sexist, either to make the reader aware of his or her own prejudices or to somewhat explain (if not forgive) where these characters are coming from. I'd say it is a mixed bag how well this works. In Marlene van Niekerk' Triomf, pretty much all the characters are white-trash Boers, and it is basically Deliverance in suburban Johannesburg. I'm not sure what she was really hoping to achieve, but it was a pretty ugly novel. It is far more unsettling encountering an intelligent, somewhat cultured but very racist narrator in Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket. I've been meaning to blog separately on this, so I won't write too much here, but the narrator is a bit hard to stomach at times, though I certainly never loathed him, as I did some of the other characters I discuss here.
Even if one is sticking to novels that are about people in the same class, there is the issue of whether the reader can ever appreciate characters that act very differently than he or she would (or at least how the reader imagines him- or herself acting in those situations). So for instance, it is almost impossible for me to relate to stories where the main characters get drunk all the time or take boatloads of drugs -- or spend all their money stupidly like so many of the artistic types Barbara Comyns was writing about. I do consider it a minor moral failing to lose control to that extent, and mostly I find these kinds of stories boring. That is the main reason it took me so long to get around to reading any novels written by the Brat Pack. Now in the better novels, there is some ironic distancing where the main character knows he (usually its a male) is acting badly* but goes and does it anyway (and there may or may not be some underlying trauma that explains why they have been driven to drugs or what have you). This is seen not only in McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, but pretty much all the works by the Canadian author, Russell Smith. When I am in a good mood, I can read these stories with equanimity, since I know for sure I will never go down that rabbit hole. When I am in a bad mood, I find these characters weak and somewhat boring. I may dislike them to some extent, but I generally would not hate these characters just for being weak. (Though if the author is trying to hard to rope me into tolerating or even forgiving bad behaviour through the use of first-person or even second-person (!) narration, then I might be more resistant.**)
There is no question I don't like books about weak-spined characters, and I've written about that here to some extent. I found it a huge drag to read Maugham's Of Human Bondage and also Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl, which at least was shorter. I suppose in both those cases, I did hate the female characters that treated their erstwhile boyfriends so badly.
I definitely don't like characters that treat others badly, even if it is in a comic vein. As it turns out, I have written more than I remembered on such "detestable" characters. Here I am trying to focus on when it is the main character (that the reader identifies with by default) that is acting so badly. I have such mixed feelings about Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Ed from Vandergaeghe's My Present Age. They are complex, intelligent characters, but they just treat people so badly essentially because they are such egoists that nothing else ultimately matters but their own desires or intellectual hobby horses. Maybe I dislike them so much, since it is something I have to fight in my own life, only sometimes with success.
I actually stopped reading Donleavy's The Ginger Man, since in addition to being such an over-the-top egoist, the main character was a wife-beater. I simply could not countenance a supposedly comic novel with such a loathsome chracter at its heart. (He's way beyond the "zany" characters that I would avoid like the plague in real life but can somewhat tolerate in fictional form.) I've kind of blocked out major parts of Cassandra at the Wedding, but as I recall, Cassandra is driving across the country, trying to disrupt and ideally block her twin sister's wedding. I certainly didn't like her, but mostly I pitied her, since she was in the midst of some kind of mental breakdown apparently. I honestly can't remember the denouement of that novel, though I'm pretty sure the wedding did go on.
To add to this list, I have discovered perhaps another appalling character, perhaps just one notch below Sebastian of The Ginger Man: Harriet from Iris Owens' After Claude. She is a lazy, clingy sponger who is also mean-spirited towards her current and former friends. She clearly has something wrong with her mental facilities, since she thinks that her friend's problem with her crashing in her apartment is fundamentally due to sexual frustration, so she arranges for a stranger to come and try to rape her while she is sleeping (yes, this is actually a plot point, and she gets all upset when her intentions are "misunderstood"). She also is about to be thrown out of another apartment, by a fed-up "boyfriend," so arranges to have the locks changed and bars herself in for a while. I can't remember ever wanting harm to come to a major character as much as I did with her. I outright hated her, and I was glad that she was going to end up joining some creepy cult by the end of the novel. Good riddance. The whole novel upset me, and not really in a good way. I'm not at all surprised that in real life Iris Owens was an "interesting" but difficult woman who was not on speaking terms with a number of her former friends. Spare me from such intelligent and interesting people...
* Along those lines of being turned off by an author trying to seduce me into being complicit with bad behaviour, I will admit to being awfully alienated from the narrator of Adiga's The White Tiger and pretty much all of Mohsin Hamid's characters.
** Actually, there is another somewhat well-worn trope with authors making a main character deeply conservative, or even racist and/or sexist, either to make the reader aware of his or her own prejudices or to somewhat explain (if not forgive) where these characters are coming from. I'd say it is a mixed bag how well this works. In Marlene van Niekerk' Triomf, pretty much all the characters are white-trash Boers, and it is basically Deliverance in suburban Johannesburg. I'm not sure what she was really hoping to achieve, but it was a pretty ugly novel. It is far more unsettling encountering an intelligent, somewhat cultured but very racist narrator in Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket. I've been meaning to blog separately on this, so I won't write too much here, but the narrator is a bit hard to stomach at times, though I certainly never loathed him, as I did some of the other characters I discuss here.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Old Poem -- An Elevator That Only Goes Up
I realized that I have really not kept up with archiving some of my older poems. That's probably for the best. I have a soft spot for many of them, but only a few of them were "validated" by getting published in literary journals. Ultimately I chose a very different path.
Before I get to this poem, I should mention that I was inspired to blog about it by the similar treatment by another author. I mentioned elsewhere that I was recently reading Clarice Lispector in the new translations published by New Directions. I remember ages ago reading some of the short stories in Soulstorm and thinking they were pretty good. So I bought a copy of her Complete Stories, but have been relying on the library for everything else. I'm glad that I did, since I strongly disliked Água Viva and A Breath of Life to the point I was wondering why I had ever liked her in the first place. Fortunately, I browsed through a few of her more conventional stories and thought she was still a decent writer, so it is just these two novels that are thoroughly experimental and not rewarding in my eyes.
Essentially the only section that really jumped out at me as something that I enjoyed was this section, practically a prose poem 2/3rd of the way through A Breath of Life.
“Elevator”
My elevator suddenly refused to elevate or lower me. It was simply moving between floors, opening the door automatically and presenting me with the slap in the face of a wall. For days: sulky, angry, vindictive. Pointless because no one wished it ill. We were only using its energy. But it got irritated and decided to be rude. It needed a lot of oil and a lot of back-and-forth to finally make up with us and lower and elevate us.
What I can’t tolerate is fuss. The object is mute, it’s without any fuss.
There was a gaze of the atmosphere of the room upon me. I felt that gaze like a mysterious comfort.
As for how the rotation of the stars produces the inertia of my ashtray — explain it if you can.
That's half a page out of two short novels! At any rate, the only reason this struck a chord with me was that I had written a few poems about "Useless objects" with this one the one that had the most legs so to speak.
An Elevator That Only Goes Up
Certainly it must be avoided in emergencies
as it would only rise,
taking people further from the ground.
Each day they move it up a floor
from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth,
from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth --
hoping that some motion might set it right --
it might go down.
They can squeeze sixty people into the elevator car.
On cue, they jump.
The springs squeal, but the elevator will not go down.
If only they could cut the cables, they think,
they could carry it down the back stairs,
put it back in its place.
Each day the elevator sits open on another floor.
No one knows what happens
when it runs out of room.
I certainly wasn't inspired by Lispector, since A Breath of Life was first published in English translation in 2012. This poem is at least 20 years old. It cribs a bit from Sexton's "Riding the Elevator into the Sky," though perhaps adds just a bit more existential dread.
Now that I think about it, I probably wrote it before I had a lot of experience with balky elevators in apartment buildings. Probably the worst was when we lived on the top floor of a residential tower in Hyde Park, Chicago. The apartment was great, except when the elevators went out! Fortunately, that was fairly rare. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall living about the 4th floor after that, so that an elevator going out of service was certainly an inconvenience, but not a climb where you had to hire sherpas.
Before I get to this poem, I should mention that I was inspired to blog about it by the similar treatment by another author. I mentioned elsewhere that I was recently reading Clarice Lispector in the new translations published by New Directions. I remember ages ago reading some of the short stories in Soulstorm and thinking they were pretty good. So I bought a copy of her Complete Stories, but have been relying on the library for everything else. I'm glad that I did, since I strongly disliked Água Viva and A Breath of Life to the point I was wondering why I had ever liked her in the first place. Fortunately, I browsed through a few of her more conventional stories and thought she was still a decent writer, so it is just these two novels that are thoroughly experimental and not rewarding in my eyes.
Essentially the only section that really jumped out at me as something that I enjoyed was this section, practically a prose poem 2/3rd of the way through A Breath of Life.
“Elevator”
My elevator suddenly refused to elevate or lower me. It was simply moving between floors, opening the door automatically and presenting me with the slap in the face of a wall. For days: sulky, angry, vindictive. Pointless because no one wished it ill. We were only using its energy. But it got irritated and decided to be rude. It needed a lot of oil and a lot of back-and-forth to finally make up with us and lower and elevate us.
What I can’t tolerate is fuss. The object is mute, it’s without any fuss.
There was a gaze of the atmosphere of the room upon me. I felt that gaze like a mysterious comfort.
As for how the rotation of the stars produces the inertia of my ashtray — explain it if you can.
That's half a page out of two short novels! At any rate, the only reason this struck a chord with me was that I had written a few poems about "Useless objects" with this one the one that had the most legs so to speak.
An Elevator That Only Goes Up
Certainly it must be avoided in emergencies
as it would only rise,
taking people further from the ground.
Each day they move it up a floor
from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth,
from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth --
hoping that some motion might set it right --
it might go down.
They can squeeze sixty people into the elevator car.
On cue, they jump.
The springs squeal, but the elevator will not go down.
If only they could cut the cables, they think,
they could carry it down the back stairs,
put it back in its place.
Each day the elevator sits open on another floor.
No one knows what happens
when it runs out of room.
I certainly wasn't inspired by Lispector, since A Breath of Life was first published in English translation in 2012. This poem is at least 20 years old. It cribs a bit from Sexton's "Riding the Elevator into the Sky," though perhaps adds just a bit more existential dread.
Now that I think about it, I probably wrote it before I had a lot of experience with balky elevators in apartment buildings. Probably the worst was when we lived on the top floor of a residential tower in Hyde Park, Chicago. The apartment was great, except when the elevators went out! Fortunately, that was fairly rare. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall living about the 4th floor after that, so that an elevator going out of service was certainly an inconvenience, but not a climb where you had to hire sherpas.
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