Tempus fugit

This afternoon I went out to Dufferin Mall to buy a new strap for my watch. (The old one broke a couple of weeks ago, but I let it slide.) I got a new one at Wal-Mart, though I feel guilty about shopping there:  I just couldn't think of anywhere else to go.  There was some event going on at Dufferin Grove nearby which Bev was interested in, so I checked the place but couldn't find anything.

It took me almost an hour to get home!  The bus service on Dufferin Street is a real pain, and I had to wait a long while before a bus showed up.  Then I had a long wait for the St. Clair streetcar. I was late for dinner, but it was microwaved quesadillas which sometimes burn my mouth, so I was glad that they'd cooled down.

Then I went to the Poetry Meetup at Hart House.  First I had to print out some poems from my translation blog (I uploaded a new post of Euripides translations the other day), so I was a bit late again.  Like my event on Sunday, about a dozen people said they were going, then people started changing their minds, and only three people showed up!  I recited a passage from Euripides' Herakles where he comes to his senses after going berserk, and one from his The Phoenician Women where Jocasta's son refuses to hand over the Thebes throne to his brother.  And I also recited my Scots translations of "The Hill" ("Th' Brae") and "George Gray" from Spoon River Anthology.  George recited his poem about Atalante, the Greek woman who raced against a man and lost because he kept distracting her by throwing golden apples.

I've now finished Erckmann & Chatrian's Waterloo.  They wrote it in the 1860s and I wonder if there was a subtext about Louis-Napoleon's vainglory. (Mexico was the Second Empire's Russia.) Later I was reading on Wikipedia about the places involved and Napoleon's relatives.  If you ask me, instead of divorcing Josephine Napoleon should have made her son Eugene his heir.

Last night I saw the documentary The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne at the Bloor with a Movie Meetup group.  It's a biography of a notorious jewel thief, and I found it a bit depressing.  But I got the first of the four free popcorns that come with renewing your membership!

Final concert

Last night was the final concert of the Columbus Centre Community Choir.  In addition to our numbers, Adolfo played Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" and Hassan from the opera sang Verdi's "La Donna e Mobile" and one of those Caruso Neapolitan songs (I think). We added the Sicilian folk song "Ciuri Ciuri" at the last minute. Afterward I suggested to Beatrice that we do a Scottish song next year, and she seemed enthusiastic.

Father and Moira weren't up to going.  But Gary was there--he almost forgot it was that night--and when Don gave me a lift afterward we brought Gary along too.  I also returned Don's book, which Father said in a handwritten note isn't so valuable because it isn't a complete set of volumes. (I hope Don can read Father's handwriting, which I often can't!)

Sunday Bev and I went to the art fusion festival at the Brickworks.   (We took a Wheeltrans cab from her place.) It was rather noisy and I couldn't stay for long.  They had a farmer's market there and now I wish I'd bought some of their rhubarb! But at the time I wasn't thinking straight.

A week ago I visited Giuseppe and now I've visited Bev.  It's a new thing for me to go out and just visit people! (Years ago I asked Mother what people did before TV, and she said they visited each other more often.)

I was telling Beatrice about my memoir group and she mentioned my blog URL in her last email to the choir. (It's at memoirslam.blogspot.ca , of course.)

I've been watching an interesting Netflix documentary about the British monarchy, hosted by David Starkey and imaginatively titled Monarchy.  And tonight we saw on Netflix the Stephen Fry documentary Wagner and Me, which was pretty engaging. (I once wrote in an online comment that Robert Wagner's acting was "anything but Wagnerian"!)

COSI FAN TUTTE

Despina (on men): "They all have the same equipment"--Cosi Fan Tutte

Today I saw the Met production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte at the Yonge & Eglinton.  That opera gets better and better as you become more familiar with the music!  Despina was a real live wire.  It was a well-directed show.

Thursday night I went on Betty-Anne's art walk.  This time she went on Dundas Street around Dufferin.  She's always pleased to hear about the latest book I'm reading.

I'm at another bottleneck in the Facebook game Tribez.  Last time it was completing the quest to allow coral production on the Ancestor's Atoll.  Now I'm stuck on the quest to allow the building of a foundry to produce bronze on Merlod Island.  I need to get five ore samples from marble pit production, but I seem to be stuck at one.  In the meantime, I'm producing a glut of marble.  Once I'm producing bronze, I'll also be able to build a factory to produce paint.

I've been translating the Carl Sandburg poem "Chicago" into Scots, French, Chinese and Japanese.  Next I'll be doing Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." I've been thinking of also doing Sandburg's "Yarns" and Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth."

In this warm weather, I like napping in the afternoon with the windows open, the noise from the street vaguely audible.

The other night I dreamed of moving to Vancouver.  I think I've had that dream before.

SHANE

Rancher: "I'll kill him if I have to!" Jack Palance: "You mean I'll kill him if you have to"--Shane

This evening I saw the iconic George Stevens western Shane once again, as a Murray Pomerance Film 101 presentation at the Event Screen. (Like last month's Hud, it features young Brandon de Wilde in a hero-worshipping role.) I think my favourite part is the scene where they're dancing to "Goodbye, Ol' Paint." Victor Young's music is the quintessential western score.

Today I used our new bread machine for the first time, to make whole wheat bread.  Now I can bake two-pound loaves with five cups of flour and two cups of water!  The recipe included gluten, so I went out and bought it at John Vince.  It also had margarine in the place of oil.  I did it like the recipe said, and the result was an oversized mushroom loaf. (I was away at the movie when it came ready, alas.) Next time I'll refrigerate the mix overnight first.

Today I also finished The Conscript, and right away started Erckmann and Chatrian's sequel Waterloo. (That's the novel I encountered as a Classics Illustrated comic.) The book I'm reading is basically a Xerox of an Everyman's Library edition published a century ago, which no longer has copyright protection.  The catch is that quality can suffer:  they missed two pages in the third chapter!  Life is simpler if you're willing to read e-books, but I have a sentimental attachment to paper.

Yesterday was the dress rehearsal for Monday's choir concert.  I was speaking to Beatrice and mentioned that Gary, whom I know from the memoir group, wanted to help with the front of the house, and they can have him hand out programs.  I mentioned that I'd been blogging my memoir pieces, and she asked me to send her the link!  She was looking for musical suggestions, and I suggested the Christmas carol "The Holly and the Ivy" and the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin's Prince Igor. (Are we crazy enough to do another untranslated Russian piece?)

Bread machine

"Yes, I have seen the vast trenches in which the dead were buried--Russians, French, and Prussians, all together--men such as God had created that they might love each other, before the invention of plumes and uniforms, which divide them into factions for the profit of those who govern them.  There they are, they embrace each other now, and if anything lives in them, as we must hope it does, they love and pardon one another, and abhor the crime which for so many years has prevented them from loving each other before their death"--The Conscript

Yesterday we finally bought a new bread machine.  We found a bargain at Canadian Tire out near the Stock Yards.  It's a Breadmaster, and Moira says Margaret has the same make. (Which proves it's the best.) This model has a paddle that gets out of the way after it's finished stirring, so there's no hole at the bottom of the loaf, and a dispenser so you can add stuff like raisins at the beginning, instead of opening it up and adding them half an hour into the process.  The booklet has some interesting recipes like pumpernickel. (With our previous machine, which lasted over ten years, the booklet was missing.)

This afternoon I visited Giuseppe, my former singing teacher.  It's been almost two years since my last lesson, and I hadn't seen him since he retired from the opera and choir a year ago.  He was pleased to see me.  The subway was being worked on east of Woodbine station, so I did quite a bit of walking.

Going there and back I read some more of The Conscript, including the passage I quote above, which strikes me as very eloquent.  I'm getting closer to what I know will be the climactic French defeat in the "battle of the nations" at Leipzig.  Seems to me that Leipzig was an even more important battle than Waterloo:  the former brought Napoleon down, while the latter confirmed that he was finished.

We're almost finished Mark Cousins' cinematic history on Netflix.  But when we saw the last episode the other night, it gave out halfway through.  We tried seeing it again tonight, but it gave out again.  The U.S. government is now investigating the trouble with Netflix service! (Netflix and Verizon are blaming each other.)

Some more thoughts on the Ontario election

I've been thinking about electoral reform in Ontario at the provincial level.  If it were up to me, I'd add to the 107 riding seats 33 more to be distributed in a way that reflected the overall popular vote. (This system would be simpler than the two-ballot proposal that Ontario voters rejected seven years ago.)

Of these 33 seats, 27 would be distributed to each party so that the total of them and the riding seats--134 in all--would be as close to their popular vote as possible. (There could be a 3% minimum level for a party to share in this distribution.) And I'd give the remaining 6 to the party that had the greatest share of the popular vote, improving the chance of a majority government.  

But what if the leading party won so many riding seats that these alone were greater than its popular-vote proportion of the 134 seats?  Then the 6 seats would go to the other parties to make up for their seat shortfall.  (If they still fell short, they'd share the shortfall equally.)

How would this work in practice?  Take the results from this election.  The Liberals got 38.7% of the popular vote and 59 seats; the Conservatives 31.2% and 27 seats; the NDP 23.7% and 21 seats; the Greens 4.8% and no seats.  The Liberal popular-vote share of 134 seats would be 52, so the 6 seats would go to the opposition and the Liberal total would remain at 59 seats.  The Conservatives would get 42 seats, including 15 additional ones; the NDP 32 seats, including 11 additional ones; the Greens 7 seats, all of them additional. (I can dream, can't I?)

The Huffington Post has switched to having all comments entered through Facebook.  The new system is flawed:  whenever someone likes a post I've written I get a Facebook notification, and some of my posts have attracted dozens of likes!  And Moira no longer has a single webpage she can open to read all my comments.

I saw in the news that Tesla is putting all its electric-car patents in the public domain.  That's a generous move, which reminds me of Canadian hero Norman Bethune.  When he was a surgeon in Canada he invented quite a few medical instruments, and could have made good money by patenting them.  But he was too principled to make money that way, and he put his inventions into the public domain instead.  A great man!

Election day

I voted in the morning. (I brought a Visa bill as proof of residence, but they weren't demanding that this time.) I voted NDP again:  I refuse to vote Liberal to defeat the Conservatives!  Even if the Liberals win we'll lose, and I'm not in the business of losing less.

I ended up doing no volunteer work for the St. Paul's NDP this time.  It wasn't because I was mad at the party, but because I couldn't seem to find the time.  And I never did find out where the campaign office was.  Hopefully the upcoming federal election will be different.

I had a gut feeling that the NDP voters would desert the party en masse for the Liberals, but that Hudak's Conservatives would win anyway.  Instead the Liberals managed a majority while the NDP still made gains.  Nobody knows anything.

Last night I saw Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde yet again, at the Yonge & Eglinton. There were only half a dozen people there!  It's one of the only Hollywood movies to capture the famous zeitgeist of identity-challenged 1960s youth. ("We rob banks.") Contemporary movies like The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank were just about as violent, but this movie's violence was so controversial because of the sexy context.  Faye Dunaway sure was hot in movies like this and Chinatown!  I hear that she's got a lot of plastic surgery in recent years:  it isn't easy being a famous hottie.

We've been having trouble connecting to Netflix on the big TV the last few days.  This evening I connected to it on my computer and then the problem went away!  Just one episode left in Mark Cousins' history of cinema!

We still haven't bought a new bread machine.  I wanted to go look for one today, but Father persuaded me to wait till the weekend flyers come out tomorrow.  He's also late evaluating the book Don lent us from the fin de siecle literature series.

THE CONSCRIPT

"Real war is not a joke"--The Travels of Babar (which then treats war as a joke, of course)

Yesterday I started reading Erckmann and Chatrian's The Conscript.  It's the first of two novels they wrote together about Joseph Bertha fighting in the last of the Napoleonic Wars.  (The second, Waterloo, is one I want to read because I've read the Classics Illustrated comic book, so I'm reading both.) 

This first one is about the campaign that culminated in Napoleon's great defeat at Leipzig, as seen by Bertha, a young man with a limp who only got drafted because they were dragging the bottom of the barrel after the annihilation of the Grande Armee in Russia.  The authors tell a straightforward story, seeing war the way it really is without the vainglory.

The other day we got the new Lapham's Quarterly, whose subject is youth.  I think I'll finish both of these novels before reading that.

This evening I went to the Bloor and saw Supermensch, a documentary about legendary agent Shep Gordon, who managed everyone from Alice Cooper to Anne Murray to Groucho Marx and has lots of stories (a few of them embellished!), directed by grateful actor Mike Myers.  I took the occasion to renew my annual Bloor membership, the real reason I went there though the movie was entertaining.  I barely got there in time, but as usual they were playing lots of trailers.

Yesterday at the memoir slam there was a girl from mainland China called Kendra, who's here on a research fellowship.  When we did the subject "The big city," she wrote about Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong; when we did "The deaths of famous people," she wrote about her intellectual idol Stuart Hall; when we did "Sensitivity," she thought we meant "sensibility." English is clearly her second language, but this seems like a good way for her to improve it.

Last night salon.com had a good article by Patrick L. Smith about the new 9/11 museum at Ground Zero and its failure to tell honest history. (I wrote a comment repeating Dylan Thomas' famous poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child by Fire in London.")

ROLT

Today was the latest ROLT event.  The topic was foreign writing translated into English, and I titled the event "In other words..." Eight people said they were coming, but only one guy besides myself showed up!  And it wasn't like one of those cold January evenings.  On top of that, we never got a waiter to take our orders. (Victory Cafe was swamped with customers that afternoon.)

I read a passage from Orhan Pamhuk's Istanbul, translated by the great Maureen Freely, reprinted in the Cities issue of Lapham's Quarterly. (Most of it was a single sentence punctuated with semicolons!) Since the King James Bible is one of history's great translation achievements, I also read the whimsical Book of Jonah.  The other guy read a section from The Five Mysteries of Life, which may well be fascinating reading but doesn't really lend itself to being listened to.

Since the group was small, I skipped a couple of other passages I had planned.  I was going to read a passage from Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum describing Oskar encountering and winning over a gang of JDs. (I'd hoped to read from Ralph Mannheim's great translation, but could only find a later translation by Breon Mitchell.) And I'd planned to read a passage from The King of the Mountains describing how Hadji Stavros ended up a bandit king.

Speaking of The King of the Mountains, I just finished it.  Since the next Lapham's Quarterly still hasn't arrived, I suppose I'll read The Conscript next.

Yesterday there was only a small group at acting class.  In the evening I went to Karaoke Meetup at Kramer's.  Jonah wasn't feeling well, so at the last minute I agreed to be substitute organizer.

Our bread machine is shot. (The revolving thing that stirs the dough came off.) I won't have time to look for a new machine until Tuesday, so the next loaf will be maybe three weeks later than the last one.

THE KING OF THE MOUNTAINS

Bitchy Mrs. Simons: "I'm English, and it's not safe to play monkey-tricks with me.  I'll complain to the Legation....  There must be something wrong.  I've travelled in Switzerland.  Switzerland is a mountainous country, yet there I never wanted for anything.  I always breakfasted when I chose, and even had trout for breakfast if I wished for it--do you hear?"--The King of the Mountains

I've started reading The King of the Mountains, Edmond About's French novel about foreigners in 19th-century Greece who get kidnapped by a bandit king.  It's funnier than it sounds. (Andrew Lang's introduction compares his Scotland from a few centuries earlier to the bandit-rife Greece in the book.)

I'm reading it because I'd read it in the form of a Classics Illustrated comic book.  I think we bought it when I was almost seven.  It happened when we took the train to Campbellton to visit Father's parents for a couple of days around New Year's:  it was the last time I saw my grandmother before her death the next year.  They bought two copies of the comic for us to read on the train. (Moira looked at the comic recently and didn't remember it at all!)  So far, the book and the comic are pretty close.

I started reading it yesterday when I went to the first Toronto Transit Enthusiasts Meetup at the Tulip restaurant near Queen and Coxwell. (I'd just eaten, so I only ordered a rice pudding dessert.) Someone mentioned that the TTC could save a lot of money just by keeping a tunnel-boring machine on hand instead of buying a new one whenever they start digging a new subway!  I'm hoping we'll get politically involved to promote TTC improvements, what with the municipal election coming up.  On the way back I stopped by the Jones library to see if the copy of The Innocents Abroad that I lost has shown up in the library system, but it hasn't.

Early this afternoon Father and I moved the old refrigerator to the sidewalk.  It got picked up just an hour or two later!

This evening I went to a trivia quiz game at the Hard Rock Cafe next to Dundas Square.  It was a joint venture by Alex' Life Begins at 40 Meetup and Yvette's Movie Meetup.  My team included Dawn, whom I'd been chatting with just a week before when we saw The Killers.  We finished second or third.  I ordered a hot fudge sundae, which felt really heavy. (It didn't help that I'd had spaghetti for dinner.)

I'm in a good mood.

I got quite a bit done in the last couple of days.  On Sunday I finally got the potatoes planted.  I had about a hundred spuds to plant, so I hoed eight rows and planted thirteen in the longer rows and twelve in the shorter ones.  Now it can rain all it pleases!  I've watered them a bit, and it turns out that our hose is awfully leaky and could use replacement.  I should also help Father dismantle the diamond-shaped planter, which will mean more room for the garden.

Sunday night I baked gingerbread for choir practice this evening.  First I had to go out and get some more molasses, and I got some cherries too because Moira likes them.  This time I floured the pan as well as greasing it, so it came out pretty easily.  It was pretty popular, of course.  At choir practice we did a new Sicilian song titled "Ciuri Ciuri." Afterward Don lent me a volume from a series of reprinted great literature from a century ago so Father can appraise it.

I also brought some to the memoir slam, as well as returning the canister of subject cards. (I'd written a lot of new ones, as well as removing a handful of duplicates.) Ten people turned out, our biggest crowd in a while.  John and Carol from Newfoundland were there after being away for months.  Our subjects were New York City, ethnic cuisine and childhood playacting, all ones that I'd submitted.

I've now finished The Last of the Mohicans.  It was pretty impressive.  Imagine my surprise finding out that the movie version had a different sister being killed! (They also had her jump off a cliff instead of being knifed.) Gamut, the psalmist forced to go native, was an interesting "tenderfoot" character.

What should I read next?  Maybe Edmond About's The King of the Mountains.  Of course, the new Lapham's Quarterly will be here pretty soon.

The Huffington Post is switching its forums to a Facebook system, and some posters are leaving for other websites.  I wasn't planning on doing that, but I should look around to see if any of the other sites are worth following too.

Acting class

Today's acting class took place at Philty McNasty's east of Eglinton station. (Our regular place was being used by some Fringe function.) We got to use the basement and turn off the music in that area.  I performed my "George Gray" monologue in the Scots version and made a pretty good impression.  Now I'm going to concentrate on my comedy monologue.

We did the exercise where you sing a song one syllable at a time and look at a different audience member each time, and this time I sang "If I Were a Rich Man." We also did a thing where each of us took the hot seat in turn, and the others imagined what our character might be like and who we should be cast as.  When it was my turn, some people picked up that I'm a social radical unhappy with the state of the world, but it was also suggested that I like marmalade. (I don't.)

The garden is now ready for planting, and Father's cut up all the seed potatoes.  I mentioned that tilling a garden for planting is a bit like an actor clearing his head before performing.  Nancy liked that comparison, since she's a gardener too!  I'd planned to plant after I got home, but wasn't up to it just yet.

Subway service was suspended on the Yonge line between Bloor and Eglinton, so some of us were late, though not by too much.  I went back by the Eglinton bus, which is slow west of Bathurst because of road construction, so I didn't get home till about 18:45! Fortunately, the others were waiting for John and Kathrine to come for dinner so I didn't cause delay.  But it turned out they aren't coming till tomorrow!

I was going to write this post in the evening, but for some reason Safari software wouldn't let me enter any writing!  I went to bed and woke up in the wee hours, and I'm writing this around 05:30!

Running short...