My diary decade

About ten years ago I started writing a diary. (Call it mid-life crisis.) I started out with the quirky approach of writing to an imaginary 13-year-old girl called Dinah.  When I saw GANGS OF NEW YORK, I wrote: "I know you want to see any movie with Leo DiCaprio in it, but I can understand your mother not wanting you to see this one." But that approach was unsustainable and I soon reverted to a more conventional approach.

This diary was a chance for me to write longhand regularly.  I'd always write about what I'd eaten for dinner because I'd always eaten something and it gave me something to write about every day, if only something small.  I figure that's why Samuel Pepys wrote about food so much.

I haven't written as much in recent years.  There was a time when I'd write every day, or at least six times a week.  But in the last year I wrote once or twice a week so I could be sure each entry would fill a whole page.  I stopped writing it when I visited London this September, and turned to this blog when I returned.

I may have to take a break from this blog for the rest of December (I haven't been feeling much energy), or just write irregularly.  But I hope to return to posting every day in the new year, which is barely a fortnight away!

AIDA

Today I saw Giuseppe Verdi's AIDA yet again at the Met simulcast.  It's one of my favorite operas.

It's the one where Aida and Radames love each other but Aida's a captured Ethiopian princess in Egypt's royal palace and Radames is a general whom the Egyptian king sends to defeat an invasion by Aida's father King Amonasro and Aida's mistress Princess Amneris loves Radames too and Radames achieves a big victory and captures Amonasro and the King makes Radames get engaged to Amneris and Amonasro pressures Aida into pressuring Radames into revealing which route the Egyptian army is taking and Radames agrees to desert and elope with Aida and unintentionally reveals the military secret and Amneris catches him and the priests convict Radames of treason and sentence him to be buried alive and Aida hides in his tomb and they face death together and Amneris prays to her gods to grant her peace.

It's one of Verdi's late works, composed a few years after the Risorgimento, and with its critical view of nationalism surely reflects the master's mixed feelings about Italian unification. (Sure, Verdi's name became an acronym for "Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy," but his own sympathies were republican.) I keep wondering if the Egyptian priests are symbols of the Catholic Church, but maybe I'm reading too much subtext into it.  

It has one of the great opera finales:  Amneris praying for peace sometimes gets me teary-eyed.  One thing I like about Verdi's dramatic sense is the way he'll take an unsympathetic character like Amneris and give him or her a moment of grace, in a rather Catholic way.  Other examples are Germont singing "Di Provenza il Mar il Suol" in LA TRAVIATA, di Luna's "Il Balen di Suo Soriso" in IL TROVATORE, and Macbeth's "Pieta, Rispetto, Amore" (all baritone songs I've been learning to sing).

MAD MEN

Now we have another mid-month gap between zip.ca DVDs, so I rented the fifth season of MAD MEN for a week.  It's an unusually intelligent, existential show about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early and mid-1960s.  It's funny--watching that show, I can see everything that was wrong with that time:  the casual racism and sexism, the stifling conformism in much of the middle class, the heedless drinking and smoking, the littering!  Yet I still feel the emotional pull of nostalgia for that time.  People today may feel superior to the pre-1968 era, but I sense that we aren't so superior today.

When you think about the show's premise, it can seem almost as bleak as Matthew Weiner's previous series THE SOPRANOS.  Sterling & Cooper reminds me a bit of Never-Neverland, with Don Draper as Peter Pan and Joan as Tinker Bell.  You have a group of original writers, artists and thinkers basically whoring their talents to sell various products and overcome the general public's sales resistance.  Yet that wasn't completely new:  artists like Michelangelo created their great religious imagery basically to "sell" the Roman Catholic Church.

I think my favorite character is the glum, unpredictable senior partner Roger Sterling. (I was surprised to learn that John Slattery is only my age.) In one episode when they tried to work with a Japanese company he caused a big scene and made an issue of the Pacific War that he'd served in.  I got a feeling that World War II was the only time when he really felt alive.

Classical music Meetup

Another of my Meetup groups is Toronto Friends of Classical Music.  Mary, the organizer, gave me the designation "Attendee extraordinaire" because I've been a member for years, going back to when she took over.

Tonight we had an event at the Mad Bean coffee house on Eglinton Avenue West, hosted by assistant organizer John D.  The subject was Beethoven, whose 242nd birthday is this Sunday.  He played for us his CDs of the Egmont Overture, the second and fourth movements of the Seventh Symphony and part of a late string quartet. (He brought new high-quality speakers.)  He also played a CD someone else brought of Glenn Gould playing the Pathetique Sonata.  But nobody else brought music to play.

I'm running short again.  I'm still not over that cold.  I've been playing that jigsaw puzzle app a lot.  We've been eating stew the last two days, and I wish there'd been more potatoes.  I still haven't finished writing out the TOR lines I'll have to have memorized soon.  I've been watching a DVD of French and German avant-garde silent movies from the 1920s and '30s, but I have a feeling I won't understand any of them.  Now I read that they didn't prosecute HSBC for money-laundering because they're afraid they'd bring down the whole financial system--maybe the financial system will collapse anyway!

SERPICO

Today I saw the DVD of Sidney Lumet's SERPICO, for about the third time. (I didn't get it from zip.ca but rented it from nearby 2Q Video.) It's a fine true-life story about Frank Serpico, a New York cop who exposed corruption among plainclothesmen.  I think there was actually a cop who broke the code of silence before Serpico, but they wrote the book about him because his story was more dramatic, what with getting shot in the face and such.

SERPICO, released in 1973, is one of those realistic New York movies of the time that prided themselves on unfancy, "gritty" realism.  The 1970s, especially the early years, was a good time for original, realistic American movies, partly because the studios were relatively uncertain about what they should be offering the public.  Al Pacino is in great, often funny form as the principled but sometimes difficult title character.  There's a lot of sharp dialogue. ("Frank, let's face it, who can trust a cop that won't take money?") I'm sure it was a big influence on the TV series HILL STREET BLUES, especially the show's undercover cop Mick Belker.

What got me interested in seeing it again was the Bradley Manning trial.  Both of them had to deal with a code of silence protecting criminal activity and superiors who preferred to cover it all up.  And both did the people a great service by showing what needed to be shown.

Another persistent cold

I've had this cold for about a week.  When I get a cold, I have a sore throat first, then nasal congestion, then finally a headache.  I'm still in the headache stage.

The last few nights I've been going to bed around 7:00, then waking up at 10:00 or 11:00, then staying up to well past midnight.  Then I sleep till about noon.

This isn't a good day for blog-writing.  I have a few subjects to write about, but I just can't work up the concentration.  I can barely even watch videos.

Just now I feel like Linus in that PEANUTS episode where he started writing a school composition about what he did on his summer vacation: "I played ball, and I went to camp." Then he said, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight... Four hundred and ninety-two words to go!"

The effort of making these posts long enough always makes me think back to when I was fifteen taking high school courses by correspondence.  The one who marked my history lessons was always making me do them over because I was too brief.  The reason that I was too brief was because they never told me how long I was supposed to be. (They only decided after I'd written it.) Frankly, "Do over in more detail" is something any idiot could say.  That period of correspondence courses is not something I look back at nostalgically.

Jigsaw puzzles

I've had a cold for the last few days. (I had to miss Coro Verdi's Sunday concert at Villa Colombo Sunday, but we're doing it again next week.) I've been killing time on the computer, so I've been looking for new games to play on Facebook.

As for my current games, I've lost interest in Farmville 2.  Raising crops can only occupy me for so long.  I started Cityville 2, but lost interest in that too.  I've recently got into Evony and Stormfall, strategy-building games similar to Kingdoms of Camelot and Glory of Rome.  And I'm still faithful to Hot Shot.

I found a new Facebook game that allows me to play online jigsaw puzzles.  Some expert said that Aspies don't like jigsaw puzzles, but I enjoy them somewhat. But I wish I could do them so that they didn't show me what the complete picture was beforehand, so it would be a complete surprise.

This got me to thinking about the jigsaw puzzles we had when I was young.  We had a couple of maps of Canada in jigsaw form.  I also recall one of a canoer waking up in the morning and seeing a huge moose leaning over him, a rather disquieting image.  And we had a huge British puzzle, whose shape was round rather than rectangular, showing half a dozen old English inns. (We must have got it when living in Brighton in the mid-'60s.)

The one thing in THE NEW YORK TIMES worth paying for

I subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES crossword puzzles.  But I just do Friday and Saturday:  I skip the Monday to Thursday puzzles, because they're too easy. (They put the easier puzzles early in the week, and they gradually get harder toward the weekend.) I used to do the Sunday crossword just in case it was one with rebuses, but I've got out of the habit lately.  As for the second Sunday, I do the diagramless every six weeks.  The puns and anagrams puzzle is a bit too easy for me, and the acrostic takes to long for the reward.

Back in 1992, the TIMES honored their first Sunday crossword's 50th anniversary by reprinting several from over the decades.  The ones from the early years were really tough!  I'd like to get a reprint of their early Sunday crosswords.

As for the rest of that newspaper, don't get me started.  The TIMES has been in decline for the last three decades, since A.M. Rosenthal was in charge.  They have the disease of thinking of themselves as "liberal enough," so when Judith Miller publishes stories promoting the coming invasion of Iraq, they think they're proving how balanced they are.

I remember one sentence from a SUNDAY TIMES "Week in Review" article back in 1988: "In countries that hated America eight years ago, American is chic today." I was impressed by the sheer condescending laziness that makes such an assertion possible. (The Sunday paper got a bit of flak back then when the editor admitted that an up-to-date "Week in Review" was less important than an up-to-date sports section.)

Another thing I recall was a report from the newspaper's Chile correspondent dismissing Chile before Pinochet's military takeover as "a backward banana republic." Never mind that Chile before 1973 was fairly developed and politically stable by South American standards.  This is redundant rhetoric (aren't all banana republics backward?) better suited to THE NEW YORK POST than to the TIMES.  But of course, it proves how "balanced" they are...

Was there once a time when I was capable of buying the SUNDAY TIMES?  It's a barely portable ripoff.  I don't even read it at the library anymore.  Nothing to miss.

"In the beginning..."

Today was ROLT's December event.  I chose children's writing as the theme and called it "In the beginning..." Almost a dozen people said they were coming, but only five showed up. (My sister Moira came for the first time, and enjoyed it.)

Unfortunately, I've had a cold for the last few days so I couldn't read as much as I intended.  I did manage to do Humpty Dumpty's poem from THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. (Its last line is "I tried to turn the handle, but--") Coincidentally, Jane read a couple of other Lewis Carroll poems:  "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter.")

There was a new member called Sebastian, who's an East Indian from Fiji.  He read us a fine story he'd written himself, about a Fiji family with a small sugar cane farm and two bullocks, and even handed out copies!  For next month I think we'll do Canadian writing.

Running short again!  This reminds me of some thirty years ago when I was briefly living in England, where there was a TV critic with a weekly column in one of the Sunday newspapers.  There was also a mediocre cop show called BERGERAC.  One Sunday, at the end of his column, this critic wrote: "If I had more space I'd write about BERGERAC.  I've been meaning to do that one of these weeks." (Ouch!)

If I were really, really rich...

I mentioned that I was watching THE GRAND TOUR a TV documentary series following art critic Brian Sewell around Italy as he talks about the experiences of young eighteenth-century British grandees there.  He's very hard to please:  he didn't like Chianti wine, dismissed the Vesuvius crater as boring, and pettifogged that the modern version of the Turin Academy was showing something they wouldn't have shown the Grand Tourists (peasant dancing to hurdy-gurdy music).  But the show is entertaining despite his efforts.

One place he stopped at was the sixteenth-century Bomarzo gardens near Rome.  That actually wasn't a Grand Tour stop; interest in that place only developed in the twentieth century.  But who cares?  It's a piece of ground where some Orsini noble commissioned a whole set of grotesque, imaginative stone statues: stuff like a grimacing head whose mouth is big enough to step into.

Which brings me to the question of what I'd do if I were really, really rich.  I'm not interested in fast cars (can't drive), fancy clothes or big mansions, but I would travel a lot.  When I was about four in the mid-'60s my father, a physics professor at Mount Allison University, spent a sabbatical year in Brighton, England.  That was about the time when Brighton was a big Mod centre, though none of us remember anything about that.  Anyway, we sailed there and back on the Greek Line ship Arcadia. (The return, I recently found out, was its last voyage before being scrapped.) I'd like to cross the Atlantic by ship again.  Also there are a few places I'd like to visit in my lifetime like Madrid's Prado art gallery and the pilgrimage mountain Tai Shan in northeastern China.

But I was also thinking, if I had the money I'd create a new Bomarzo.  One of my statues might be of Glooscap, the Hercules-like hero of the Micmac, a native people in eastern Canada, showing him sailing away on a whale as they say he finally did. (Whale-riding is found in a lot of cultures:  even Herodotus had a story about someone riding a dolphin.) Or I might have some famous Canadian explorers like Humphrey Gilbert (gesturing his palm toward heaven just before his ship was lost) or Lief the Lucky.  Or theatrical heroes like King Lear (raging on the moor), or opera heroes like Rigoletto.  Just so long as they're larger than life.

I've finished Herodotus!

Yesterday I finally finished Herodotus' history.  This edition also has several appendices and an introduction, but I mostly skipped over that part.  The eighth volume is largely about the sea war, culminating in the Battle of Salamis; the ninth and last is about the later land war, culminating in the Battle of Plataya.

You know those cheesy war movies where the sergeant gets orders to gather his men and retreat, and he says "The HELL we'll retreat!"? There's a scene like that in Herodotus' book from just before Plataya.  In that version the non-retreaters relented when they realized they were on their own.

There's also a story near the end about how the Persian Emperor Xerxes fell in love with his brother's wife, and married off his son to the wife's daughter, then his fancy turned to his niece, then his jealous wife blamed the brother's wife and had her disfigured, then the brother ran off to a remote province to start a rebellion, then the Emperor's army caught up with him and killed him.... They should make that into an opera.

Seriously, the first place I remember reading about the Greco-Persian Wars was in a comic book where Uncle Scrooge and his brood used a time machine to land on the Plain of Marathon just as the Battle was about to start...

Now I've returned to the politics issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY.  My next big book will be the first volume of Mark Twain's century-delayed autobiography, which I've heard reads like a blog.

I also finished the first season of HELL ON WHEELS yesterday on Netflix.  It's a powerful show, with an effect that builds cumulatively. One line goes, "Choose hate.  It's easier." A quibble: How did the surveyor's widow manage to stay so gorgeous while living on the frontier? (Such visual license I can live with, of course.)

Geeks like me

Today I had lunch with my Aspergers Meetup group at Spring Rolls just south of Yonge & Bloor.  Tiffany, who lives in Hamilton, was in Toronto so she had an event.  The others visited Allen Gardens first, but Bev and I weren't up to that and met up with them at the restaurant.  Too bad it wasn't a day earlier when the weather was far milder.

The food is pretty good there:  I ate Malaysian spicy chicken fried rice.  At these events I tend to talk to Bev more than anyone else:  we're the two oldest people in the group.  She's twice as passionate about Bradley Manning as I am. (We've been talking a lot about that case at THE HUFFINGTON POST the last few days.  I wrote of the bit in SERPICO where Al Pacino's girlfriend told the story of a king who was the only one in the kingdom who didn't drink from a well that made people crazy, so they thought he was the crazy one instead, until he drank too and they decided he'd come to his senses.)

In the evening I went to another Aspie event at the Geneva Centre.  I used to go to an Aspergers support group there because I wanted to meet people, but then I decided I could do it through other means like Meetup.

Anyhow, this event involves a psychologist called Jonathan Weiss who got a research grant and wants to work with us Aspies on things like "mindfulness." We'll see how that works out.  I've worked with a psychologist before:  Liljana Vuketic interviewed me in researching her doctoral dissertation, and paid me $200 which I promptly squandered on books.  BTW, they've now stopped calling it Aspergers and just call it high-functioning autistic spectrum disorder, or something like that.

Children's encyclopedias

When I was little we had Harwyn's THE ART LINKLETTER PICTURE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, originally published in 1961.  I read somewhere online that many of the artists who illustrated it also worked on EC's notorious horror comics.  I remember being creeped out by the picture of Macbeth gleefully preparing to knife the king, and I guess that had an EC sensibility.

We also had Bobley's ILLUSTRATED WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA.  The entry on communism is a McCarthyite classic.  Under the sub-heading "What makes people communists?" it says "In democratic nations, a communist is often a person with a sort of mental illness..." The item about rivers says "They can be damned [sic]..." (Was that REALLY a typo?) This edition had a last-minute addendum about the just-elected Richard Nixon.

And we had a 1930s edition of the British encyclopedia THE WORLD BOOK. (The entry on flags showed the Third Reich's swastika flag.) It had a special volume focusing on the British Empire's dominions.  It was an incomplete set:  the volume covering Irw to Mis somehow got misplaced.  It had a last-minute addendum about the new king George VI.

And then there's THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE.  That started out being published in Britain around 1910 with the title CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, and Grolier published it in the US with its new title.  THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE has gone through many revised versions, but we had the first Canadian edition from the 1920s, substantially the same as the original British version, though it added some stuff about World War I and some specifically Canadian items. (I think there was a photo of Moncton, the city we lived closest to.) Mother's family bought it when she was a little girl.

THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE in its early versions had an earnestly didactic style, not quite as manipulative as more recent counterparts.  It was a 20-volume set, divided into lots of categories like "The Book of the Earth," "The Book of Things to Make and Do," and "The Story of Famous Books." "The Book of Wonder" had the "Wise Man" answering questions like "Did any of the Apostles visit Britain?" and "Will the last man die gasping for air?" a question characteristic of the time. "The Book of Life" had a section called "Alcohol, the enemy of life." (This was the age of Prohibition, of course.) And it had a lot of children's stories with some remarkable illustrations:  I think Sir Arthur Rackham worked on it.

The pleasant mount

I'm not a big fan of cemeteries.  My old home in New Brunswick was fairly close to the local cemetery, but I rarely visited it.  Even when the subway between St. Clair and Davisville stations carries me past Mount Pleasant Cemetery, I tend to avoid looking at it.  But I have visited that place several times with Meetup groups.

I've got to know some of the sights in Mount Pleasant cemetery:  the Massey and Thompson mausoleums, Mackenzie King's grave, the Stavros tomb (it's a little much), the Salvation Army's memorial to the EMPRESS OF IRELAND shipwreck, and the lane with a whole lot of millionaire mausoleums like the Eatons.  I've also discovered a few things for myself, like opera soprano Teresa Stratas' family plot (at least I think it's her--the epitath refers to music), and the graves of journalists Norman Depoe and Larry Zolf.  I'd like to find a grave I've heard of there where the eccentric deceased chose a completely unmarked boulder as his headstone.

Saturday I visited it again as part of the Urban Explorers Meetup organized by Vik. (We also went southeast to the Discovery Walk loop, which took us past the brick works.  On the way back, we took a wrong turn and had to take a precarious path, which was actually pretty fun.) Vik told us about some of the prominent trees there, and mourned a weeping willow that was a victim of a recent storm. I quipped, "They should have a cemetery for trees!"

In China they have something called "tree burial," where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  I think I'd like to have that done with my body:  I like the idea of having a living monument.  On the other hand, Zoroastrians in India put you on a high tower and feed you to the vultures:  a very eco-friendly method, for what it's worth.

THE MASTER

Last night I finally went to see Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER at the Revue.  This time I had the wits to walk south from Dundas West station instead of waiting for the streetcar.

I'm not a big Anderson fan.  I liked BOOGIE NIGHTS, but I couldn't take more than a few minutes of MAGNOLIA or PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE. (Moira liked MAGNOLIA, so maybe I should try it again, or maybe not.) THERE WILL BE BLOOD I found oddly off-putting, though Daniel Day-Lewis was worthy, if not as appealing as he got to be in LINCOLN.

Didn't care much for this one either.  Before I saw it, Moira--who hadn't even seen the movie--predicted that I wouldn't like Joaquin Phoenix' performance, and she was right!  I don't know where she got the gift of prophecy.  He was rather annoying as the cult newcomer:  I could see him "acting." (He might get an Oscar nomination.) Philip Seymour Hoffman was better as the cult leader:  watching him just felt more comfortable.

I'm sometimes attracted to movies like this because of the 1950s setting, another example being Terence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE. (Watching that movie was like doing a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing.) But this film could have been called "The World Is Full of Idiots."

Hoffman sings the song "I'll go no more a-roving" during an ORGY scene! (That reminded me of all the classic music A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ruined.) At least, it was sort of an orgy: the women got naked, but there didn't seem to be any sex happening.  Not as self-important as the EYES WIDE SHUT orgy, but pretty slight.

It's the kind of movie that his this dialogue exchange: "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing."

("We'll quit repeating our lines." "Say it again.")

Query:  In the scene where Phoenix sees Hoffman's boat for the first time, they're playing chacha music.  Did they have that as early as 1950?

Two months!

I've now been posting daily for two months without interruption. (It looks like I only posted 29 times in November, but that's because last night's post was published after midnight.) I'm getting an appreciation for ministers who manage to come up with a sermon every Sunday, week after week.

Blogger.com gives me an overview of how many views each post receives.  I usually fluctuate between ten and twenty or so, but when I wrote about THE HUFFINGTON POST Wednesday, that got fifty views!  That's what brings in the troupers. (I'm tempted to write about popular subjects all the time, but I have my integrity...) My post with recipes for fettucine alfredo and gingerbread also got a lot of views.

I'm still writing down subjects for future posts.  One I haven't got around to is the children's encyclopedias I knew in my youth.  And now that I've mentioned it, I'll have to write about it before long rather than keep my audience hanging.

I've run short again.  Should I mention that we ate tacos last night? Or that I was a long time getting to sleep last night because I felt happy?  Or that I dreamed about being an actor and having to deliver lines while running down a stairwell?  Or that because it's now December I'm going to start taking my Cipralex daily instead of four times a week so winter won't get me depressed?  Or that I've run out of razor blades and haven't got around to getting new ones yet? (I planned to stop using the last one at the end of the month, but nobody will die if I use it one extra time...)

HUFFINGTON POST moderators, are you reading this?

I was going to post about the movie THE MASTER tonight.  I got on a streetcar and went to St. Clair & Dufferin to take the bus south to the Bloor subway to Dufferin station, then go west to the Dundas West station, then take a streetcar south on Roncesvalles to the Revue Cinema.  I could have walked to St. Clair & Ossington and taken the bus south to Ossington station, but I figured that the Dufferin bus was more frequent and less likely to be delayed.

As it turned out, the Dufferin bus did have a fairly long delay, so when I reached the Dundas West station I already had little time to spare.  Then there was ANOTHER delay on the part of the Roncesvalles streetcar, and I couldn't get to the cinema on time, so I went home. (I wasn't so sure I wanted to see THE MASTER, but I'll definitely have to see it now that I've made you readers curious!)

What shall I write about instead?  Yesterday at THE HUFFINGTON POST I read a post saying "Many posters say the Dems won the election.  The Repubs, however, were given a strong House majority.  No one won, so each side needs to bend." So I wrote a reply: "Of course, the Republicans lost the popular vote and had to win through gerrymandering..." (I like putting an ellipse at the end of my post.  Gives it a bit of ponderous style.) So someone replied to me: "I live in a reality based world.  Redistricting is reality.  Whining is unbecoming."

Such snark I can't take lying down, so I replied to him: "In other words, 'We cheated and won, so just shut up.' (Same as Bush v. Gore.)" But the Huffpost moderators blocked this reply, and I later figured out that the words "shut up" automatically get a post blocked, even in the context of quotation marks. I confirmed this when I rewrote the post with "say nothing" in the place of "shut up," and it wasn't blocked.

Moderators, you need to make a public announcement of all the terms that'll automatically get you blocked. (I wish they'd send a message saying something like "You can't post this because it includes the words "shut up.") I know that a lot of the people who post at the site are bothered about their posts being blocked for reasons they have no idea of.