Summer Reading

A few posts back, I talked about "summer reading" books that were hitting the libraries and book stores.  While a few do look like they might be interesting, I don't really think any of them are going to make my list this year.

I am so close to wrapping up Dombey and Son, and then on to things I will actually enjoy.  I was going over my list of what I had read and actually enjoyed in 2025, and there wasn't that much.  The best books have been rereadings: A Month in the Country, America Fantastica and Lafcadio's Adventures (and the second and third had some fall-off in terms of my overall enjoyment from the first reading!).  I will need to reread Calvino's Invisible Cities, and that will likely also contribute to this finding that the new-to-me books just aren't cutting it right now.

I am reading (or rather rereading) Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (NYRB), which curiously enough has many parallels to Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China.  They both seem to feature extremely cynical, oversexed young men, which isn't exactly what I need to read at the moment.

I am going to make a real effort to read new books I actually will enjoy, so I'm going to turn to The Leopard ✓ soon and probably Lord Vishnu's Love Handles ✓, and maybe Azuela's The Underdogs ✓.  If there is time beyond that I was hoping to get to short stories by Mavis Gallant and perhaps Edna O'Brien.  Then I will likely turn to Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman ✓ and Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, though I do worry it will have turned to fall before I crack them open.  Maybe I should take one or two on the trip out to Montreal (which indeed I should book fairly soon before my calendar completely fills up...)  Maybe I could take St. Urbain's Horseman ✓ (which has connections to Montreal, even though set in London!) and Walden ✓, which is calling out to be read.

Sneak Peek - August at the Revue

I was a bit afraid this would happen.  Suddenly, the Revue is doing something like 8 straight days of Kurosawa films in early August, though perhaps ironically not Rhapsody in August.

Getting over there is often a chore, but I will do it for truly amazing films, and I expect I'll see most of these, though I can skip Yojimbo, having just seen it at the Revue about a month back (even though this is a better restoration).  I may or may not go out to see Ikiru.  I loved this the first time I saw it, but the second time I found the framing and over-bearing narration to really detract from the film.  Maybe third time's the charm?  I will likely go back to see High and Low, even though I did see this as the Paradise, but really liked it.

Anyway, I don't appear to have too many conflicts, so I will try to make the series.  I remember being a bit upset that I missed Seven Samurai at Carlton, but this will definitely be a better experience, aside from the travel involved.  (On a side note, seeing Ran at the Fox was a real disappointment - they don't have staggered seats and the slope of the theatre is just too flat, so there were always people's heads in the way.  I think I am just done going out to the Fox.  It really is an inferior movie-going experience.)  I just need to work out whether seeing these five or six films (plus Peter Sellars in Being There this Sunday) makes it worthwhile to splurge on a membership at the Revue, despite it being on the other side of town.  Possibly so, though I would need to go to about 17 films/year to make it worthwhile, and I am quite unlikely to take advantage of a free film on my birthday, whereas at the Paradise it is a free film in your birthday month!

I still haven't buckled down and ordered tickets to TO Summer Music Fest or to Fringe, so I need to do that tonight and tomorrow!

Edit (06/23): I ended up buying a few tickets at the Revue Box Office on Sunday, when I was there to see Being There.  I guess I won't get the membership after all.  I'm still a bit on the fence on seeing Ikiru again, but I likely will.  The trickiest decision is The Hidden Fortress on Aug. 1.  I didn't buy a ticket because I had something scribbled on the calendar.  It was a note that I had planned on going to a TO Summer Music concert that evening.  It turns out it is Mendelssohn's Octet, which I like quite a bit.  If the concert was a bit earlier (or the movie later), or even if they were playing the Octet in the first half of the concert, I would try to do both.  However, I have seen the Octet played at least twice before and perhaps more often than that.  (The decision is made just slightly easier because Jonathan Crow isn't actually performing, though I still wish I could somehow do both...)  On balance I think I should go see The Hidden Fortress, which is not screened very often at all and just hope that the Octet pops up in the next couple of years.  And while I am not a huge samurai movie buff, I definitely should see Throne of Blood, which is Kurosawa's remake of Macbeth, and probably Sanjuro as well, which would definitely be a lot of trips over to the Revue.  I just hope it doesn't rain too much in early August...

 

New Fiction

It's always hard to dip my toe back into blogging after some time away.  I actually have (hand)written out 10 or more pages of what I have been up to in the past month or so, but don't feel like typing it out, at least not right now when I still have a lot of pressing business to take care of, even on the weekends.  I used to have a pretty decent voice-to-type program called Dragon.  I am sure by now the technology is so much better than it used to be, and indeed there are probably freeware versions that would be perfectly adequate.  (But before I go too far down this road, I would have to see if I even can get the computer to recognize a pair of headphones (with a microphone!) in order to even test it.)  Something for another day, though it is awfully tempting to just read out all the many pages I have been writing these past few months, most often at the Rex. 

Indeed, I was over at the Rex last night to see Eric St-Laurent for the second time this month.  I only could stay for the first set, so I didn't get to see his "freak-out" number where they compress 15 or more hits into one super fast medley.  (I was joking with him a bit before the show that his versions were an awful lot like Alien Ant Farm's version of "Smooth Criminal," to the point that no one would know if he was riffing off the original or the cover...)  Anyway, they sounded good, though the mike on the congas was too hot, and hopefully they fixed that in the second set.  Still, I was glad to manage to catch them (and write out a few more pages of my planning epic), since I wasn't sure that would have the time.  I was meeting Andrea over at Carlton to see Midnight Cowboy, which I had never seen, even though I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen.  Still, a pretty gritty movie in lots of ways.  Glad to have seen it now (and Taxi Driver not so long ago).  I also was able to stop by Bulk Mine on Yonge and pick up some packets of Quavers for the book club meeting on Monday.  (We're reading Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which is of course also depressing, and we agreed to try to bring British snacks...)

In terms of my reading, I am slowly making my way through Castellanos's The Song of Lamentations, and I made a big push on Dickens's Dombey and Son on Wednesday evening while out at Budweiser Stage to see Simple Minds, as well as Modern English and Soft Cell (the last one being quite boring actually, and I read during their set, aside from during "Tainted Love").  It did sprinkle on and off, particularly during Soft Cell, but it was much better than I was expecting, weather-wise, so that worked out.  However, I didn't want to bring anything aside from a poncho and my phone, so fortunately I was able to get an ebook version of Dombey and Son loaded onto the phone.  I have just over 300 pages to go, so hopefully I can wrap that up by the end of next week.  Some books are worth the extra length, but this one drags a fair bit.  (If only I had managed to get 100 more pages into it on the train ride to Ottawa, then I would really feel I was nearing the finish line.  As an aside, it looks like Via workers aren't going on strike after all.  Yea!)  Getting home from Budweiser Stage was a nightmare, and I wished I had biked there after all, though of course I wouldn't have done that, given the forecast.

 
Anyway, as if I didn't have scads and scads of unread books around the house, but I thought I would highlight just a few novels from this list in today's Guardian.  A handful of them aren't even available to reserve at the library, and if I don't write them down now, I just won't remember them.

These are the ones that are catching my eye:
The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha
Gunk by Saba Sams
Dream State by Eric Puchner
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Endling by Maria Reva (might be interesting to compare to Kurkov's Grey Bees)
Spent by Alison Bechdel (should not take too long to read, as this is a graphic novel)

So perhaps a manageable summer reading list, if I didn't have so many other books I feel guilty about not reading...

 

 

Busy Week Bracketed by Beethoven

I'm not exactly sure what is going on but I have been slipping a lot on Sundays and not getting to the gym when I originally plan to go.  The good news is that I almost always force myself to go, and then it isn't so bad, but then I am running late for everything else I have planned later in the day.  So two Sundays ago, I made it over to the gym, finished packing for my various trips, then took the TTC to Hart House.  Of course, the TTC was quite unreliable as ever, including a bus that then picked up the pace while I was walking between stops.  This is so frustrating.  In the end, I would say the TTC cost me 10 minutes, and I just strolled up to Hart House at 2:35, when I had really planned to get there at 2:15 or so, though as I said I was running just a bit late and didn't set out in time.  Had I made it at 2:25 (a more reasonable target based on when I left), I probably would have gotten tickets to the Hart House Orchestra concert without too much difficulty.  But I was at the very front of the "no ticket" line, and they were trying to convince people to go upstairs to watch a closed circuit version of the concert.  That seemed pretty stupid to me, and I decided I might as well try to get inside.  Had I been much further back, I would have just left and probably tried to work for a couple of hours before my train left.  However, I just waited out and was rewarded with one of the very last wrist bands to get in.  They did Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and Beethoven's 5th Symphony.  Always great to hear these live.  I actually briefly talked to my friend David who plays bass with the orchestra, though the musicians themselves (sadly) don't have access to extra tickets.  

After this, I took the subway to Queen St. and picked up some Vietnamese food to go from Ginger.  I dropped in at work and grabbed a huge stack of business cards and printed out a couple of things, including a card for my son, who I was planning on meeting in Ottawa.  Sadly, the train was about 45 minutes late, and it was a bit hard for me to concentrate on my reading while standing (uncomfortably) in line to board.  Not surprisingly, we got to Ottawa close to an hour late.  As it happens, the LRT would have been closed anyway (had we been on time), as it closes at 11 on Sunday evening.  So I took a cab to the Ottawa Hostel.  The driver was reasonably pleasant but he just put the pedal to the metal, trying to get back to the train station for a more lucrative fare.  The hostel was fine, though I really had to get ready for bed in near complete silence, as several people were already sleeping.  (I certainly ran into several people who couldn't believe I would share a room in a hostel, even at such a low, low rate -- $40.)

As it turns out, the hostel was only a block away from the CTRF conference, which was great.  I pretty much rolled out of bed, dressed in a better set of clothes, threw everything in a locker (I had remembered to bring my own lock) and walked over to the conference.  I have to agree, it really does feel a lot like the old TRB (i.e. quite academic) but considerably smaller and still fairly freight and logistics-oriented.  But I enjoyed going, and I'll see if I can go next year when it is in Halifax.  I was able to meet a couple of people from Alto (the agency that will be trying to develop a high speed rail system between Toronto and Quebec City), so that was a big mission accomplished.  My presentation (on ride-sharing systems during and after the pandemic) was in the late afternoon; I think it went well, and I was asked several questions.  Then I went over to the reception, but I had to leave early to meet my son.  We went to an Indian place in Byward Market.

Tues. was pretty much the same thing, though I didn't have as much pressure, since my presentation was over.  I actually left my bag at the hostel, then ducked out from the presentation after lunch and ran over to the Ottawa Art Gallery.  (I didn't even know such a thing existed.  It had a pretty decent exhibit on the 3rd floor of some Group of Seven paintings and some abstract expressionist works.  As it happens, this too is right around the corner from the hostel, so I grabbed my bag and went back to the conference for the workshops after lunch.  I had to skip out just a bit early (only about 15 minutes) and this time I was able to catch the LRT over to Tremblay to catch the VIA train back to Toronto.  Between VIA and TTC, I got home around midnight.

I downloaded the Lyft app on my phone and figured I might as well use it once to get a record of actually using the app, which would help me get rides in LA.  I quickly swapped out my clothes for a new set for my next trip.  I guess I got about 3 hours of sleep, then it was time to get up for my Lyft ride to Pearson.  I ended up sitting next to my boss on the flight, so we talked over some work issues.  I read a bit, but not a lot and did try to get a bit of sleep.  LAX was a bit of a mess per usual, though they were giving out free waffles and iced coffee for some unknown reason.

We then went over to the LA offices and met a few people and talked about some upcoming projects.  I was able to meet up with someone I used to work with in Chicago while at Cambridge Systematics.  We had a good chat, and then I hoofed it back to the office to meet up with a group that was going out for dinner and drinks.  They found a place that had lots of different food vendors under one roof.  While the Mexican was tempting, I ended up at a Thai place that was quite tasty.

Thurs. was mostly an overview of company strategy, though we did take a field trip on the E line out to the site of the Lucas Museum (the one that Chicago and later San Francisco turned down).  We had dinner and drinks on the top floor of the hotel, which was super convenient for those of us staying at the hotel.  Some of the juniors ended up going out to a bar, but I declined.

Friday was only a half day talking about our transportation equity practice, which was interesting and depressing in equal measure (as Trump is trying to squelch anything that even remotely looks progressive or would promote equity).  Then after lunch (which was indeed a sort of Mexican salad), I took a Lyft over to LACMA.  I'll have to circle back and post some photos of the art later.  It turns out that Lyft wouldn't work at all unless I had data roaming turned on, which is pretty annoying.  One strange thing was that they are holding off on producing a new guide to LACMA until the new wing opens (supposedly in April 2026), so I went kind of wild taking photos of almost everything on the 3rd floor.  They even had a room that was completely Picasso paintings (and a few sculptures).  I was worried that the huge David Hockney painting would be off view until the Geffen Wing opened, but it was there on the 3rd floor.

One thing that was a bit worrying was that, after I had taken hundreds of photos at LACMA, my phone battery was dangerously low, and I wasn't sure I would even be able to book (and pay!) the next Lyft driver.  I had to put it on extreme battery saver, but I just managed to make it to a restaurant in Culver City.  The maitre d' was willing to charge it up while we had dinner, which was very accommodating of him.  I was meeting a friend who lives in L.A. with her husband.  We hadn't seen each other since about 2014, when I came down to see Kronos Quartet at UCLA.  The food was fine, though the portions were too small.  I didn't ask, but they did offer to drive me to the airport, and I didn't need a lot of convincing.  I made it through security in plenty of time.  We were all taking the same red eye flight back to Toronto that evening, though this time I didn't sit near my boss.

I got a bit more reading done but mostly tried to sleep.  In the end, over both trips I only read 300 pages of Dombey and Son (though I did get to one major plot twist, which I thought happened a bit too early in the book).  I didn't actually expect to finish the book, though I had wanted to get to 400 pages or so.  I'm going to have to quickly read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which is a fast read so far, though of course it is pretty depressing.  Then I may sort of alternate chapters of Dombey and Son and The Book of Lamentations.

I guess between a bit of a delay, customs and then UP-Express and the TTC, I didn't actually get home until just a bit before 8 am.  I had my alarm set for 10:30, as I wanted to see the Bach's Keyboard concert, which was part of this year's Bach Fest.  At least the concert was just up on Danforth.  So I saw that, hit No Frills on the way over to the library to pick up a book, and then dropped off some dry cleaning.  I actually biked over to 401 Richmond and looked at a few exhibits there, then came home.  I was actually able to swim a full set of laps, and then I went back out to see the TSO doing a fine version of Beethoven's Symphony 3.  So it was a pretty busy day.  Sunday was not nearly as busy, though I still didn't just stay home and rest, as I surely should have done, but I will write about this week (and some upcoming events) a bit later.

Ciao.

Wrapping Up May Reading

I'm not even sure if I finished Joy Williams' State of Grace in early May or late April.  I have to say I didn't care for it all that much.  I am sure this is mostly because I was icked out over the relationship between the daughter and her father, a somewhat itinerant (and over-bearing) preacher.  I did find the scene where the mother crashes a car and kills her other daughter and then says to the narrator that she wishes it had been her (the narrator) that died instead to be grim and a bit gripping, but generally the book didn't move me, even with yet another car crash (this time caused by her fiancé).  I thought the periodic interjections by the Answer Man on the radio were interesting but worked better in the short story "The Lover" from Taking Care.  (Taking Care was definitely a more rewarding book for me with my favourite story being "Train.")

I am almost certain that I finished Dorothy Edwards' Winter Sonata in April.  This is one where just not enough happened to satisfy me at all.  In fact, if you read the blurbs on the back of the book, it makes it seem as if the tentative love affair started by the visiting cellist dies out as the seasons change, when in fact it doesn't seem as if the cellist even contemplated making any kind of move on his neighbour, not least because he spends over half the book sick in bed!  And then it turns out he is thinking of moving to the village permanently, so he may well have more opportunities to follow through.  Talk about false advertising.  I'm going to see if I can manage to donate this to a UT library, though a friend of mine may want to read it first.

Winter Sonata did, however, lead me back to the far superior A Month in the Country, and I reread this in just a few days.  I learned fairly recently that this was made into a movie, and I guess I will suggest it to the curator of Contours over at Paradise.

I think it was last week that I saw The Woman in the Dunes at the Fox.  (Somehow I left my spare biking gloves behind.  I tried to go right back inside, but the doors were locked.  I emailed them, but they haven't turned up so far.  Drat!)  This was quite useful, as there were a few points in the novel that I somehow overlooked (the fact that the villages wanted a sex show in exchange for letting the man out to see the sea and that he explicitly waited around to show the other villagers his water gathering mechanism instead of trying to escape).  I think I was kind of weary of the novel by this point and ready to return it.  So the movie brought out some elements of the novel that I had skated over, much like I did with Under the Volcano a few years back.  I will say that when I realized he decided not to escape for quite inexplicable reasons I really turned against the book and the movie to a lesser extent.  (I am glad that I didn't go to the book club talk on the book, as there was just a taste of this at the end of the movie, and one of the Torontonians kept going on and on, as he was so in love with his own voice.)

In terms of the book club at work, they are reading Murakami's What I Talk About What I Talk About Running.  I won't be in town, but just reading a few pages in, I found myself so alienated from Murakami.  He's like I just stumbled into running a successful jazz bar and then I decided on a lark to write a novel (after watching a baseball game), and then I submitted it and won this prize, and then I decided to sell the bar to focus on writing.  It may all be true, but it is completely insufferable, and I couldn't bear to read any more of his humble-bragging.  I didn't like the other possible book: Nigel Barley's Adventures in a Mud Hut, which is a somewhat snarky anthropological text.

It turns out it is next to impossible to borrow the Mud Hut book, so the club dropped it, and is going with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go instead.  Interestingly, this is in very high demand at the library for some unclear reason.  I think tomorrow I am going to return the two books I didn't like to Robarts and then see if University College still has a copy I can borrow.  I also will check out the Hart House Art Museum, since it is open late on Wednesdays.

I just finished Dawn Powell's collection of short stories, Sunday, Monday and Always.  Sadly, I didn't like this much at all.  Most of the characters are quite unpleasant and not nearly as amusing as they can be in her novels.  I'm not quite sure why that is, but these stories just didn't work for me, with the single exception of "The Glads."  Interestingly, she was never able to sell "The Glads" to any magazine, probably because the ending is exceptionally dark.  I'm going to see if I can sell this and State of Grace to BMW or Seeker's Books.

In terms of what I am currently reading, I have just started The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos.  Fortunately, it isn't as long as I feared (a bit under 400 pages).  It is basically about a real-life uprising of the descendants of Mayan Indians against the Mexican elites, but it is set in the 1930s (decades after the actual uprising).

I'm not sure if I actually will read Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, though it seems like it would pair reasonably well with The Book of Lamentations ✓.  As I said, I will likely be reading Never Let Me Go ✓, and then on my trips to Ottawa and L.A., I think I'll bring along Dicken's Dombey and Son ✓.  If I manage to get through all this, and there is any reading time left for June, I think I will turn to Lampedusa's The Leopard ✓, Mavis Gallant's The Cost of Living and then Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow.  And perhaps Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem ✓ and Lord Vishnu's Love Handles ✓.  After that, I'll just pick more from the top part of this list.

Edit (5/21): I was able to visit the Hart House Art Museum this evening.  The exhibits were basically UT art students' final projects.  I will say it has been quite a while since I've seen exhibits there that really wow me, but I do try to go two or three times each year to catch each new show.  I'm usually around campus for other reasons.  I was frustrated to find out that University College Library closed up on May 1 and won't reopen until the fall.  Had I known, I would have requested the book be sent to Robarts.  I'll go ahead and do that, but not until the middle of next week, as I won't be around to grab the book while I am traveling.

Transience (or The Flowering Trees of Riverdale)

This will be a bit more of a photo-essay.  As most people know, we went through cherry blossom season a couple of weeks ago.  It generally only lasts about a week.  I never go to High Park, since huge crowds turn up there with many people displaying poor behaviour (and it is a true wonder that more trees are not permanently damaged).  There is a very small grove of cherry trees at the northern end of Trinity-Bellwoods Park, but I only saw them in passing (coming back from MoCA actually).  I instead try to stop by the small cluster of trees just to the west of Robarts.  (Granted Robarts is nowhere near Riverdale, but these blossoms are even more transient than the apple blossoms and other flowering trees, so I wanted to kick things off with them...)  

While the cherry trees outside Robarts are a poorly kept secret, there weren't too many people there that morning, though there were definitely more people in the late afternoon when I stopped by again.  (I believe I was off to see Tafelmusik that evening.)

 
Basically the same view, but with crowds...

Then this tree is just to the north of Campbell House.

And then on to Riverdale itself.  I don't know what sort of tree this is, though possibly some sort of flowering apple or even crab apple tree.

 

 

And ending with a pretty tree on my block.

A week or two after the cherry trees start to lose their petals, then lilacs bloom (and last much longer).  I am not sure I actually have any recent photos of lilacs, but I'll try to snap one soon and post it here.  I actually have a small lilac in the back yard, but because it is largely shaded, it blooms quite a bit later.

 

These bushes are actually just across the street from a construction site for the Ontario Line, which will be my next photo-essay to follow shortly.

 

 

Mail Strike Redux

It's going to happen.  Canada Post workers are going back on strike this Friday, barring any last minute legal intervention (or an even longer shot settlement).  Not only are the union and Canada Post management very far apart, the most recent study of the situation indicates that Canada Post will never be solvent again and recommends a whole host of recommendations that would really gut the postal service, perhaps leading to almost no mail service in rural areas and vastly cut back service in urban areas (where the service at least comes close to breaking even).  As you can imagine, the union completely rejects this, and if the government accept these findings as the basis of any new deal, I don't think there will be any deal at all, and, in fact, the government may be forced to dissolve Canada Post (and break the union completely) and then set up something new that is non-unionized.  Hard to imagine that happening, but not completely inconceivable.  I suppose it is much more likely in the States, where they are very close to breaking their post office as well.

I still have one more CD in the mail from Japan, which might get caught in the crossfire.  Also, there is a package on the way from Dusty Groove in Chicago.  I may luck out and this gets in just under the wire, but most likely not, esp. as I probably have to pay customs duties on the package.  (Another compelling reason why I decided to stop having anything from Chicago shipped up here...)

I have switched almost entirely to digital delivery, certainly of bills and so forth, but TSO is in this really weird place where they want to force you to get tickets on the app (rather than emailing tickets) and if you refuse that, then they mail you the tickets.  They will have to change their practice if the strike has such long-lasting ramifications.  I will have to go through my recent mail to see what else can be switched over to digital delivery, which if adopted more broadly by more Canadians of course just further puts Canada Post on a death spiral.  It is sad of course to see how many institutions that have lasted generations are dying before our eyes.  This won't be the last, of course.