Classic Book Club

"But, according to the success with which you put this and that together, you get a woman and a fish apart, or a Mermaid in combination.  And Mr. Inspector could turn out nothing better than a Mermaid, which no judge and jury would believe in"--Our Mutual Friend

Yesterday afternoon the Classic Book Club Meetup met and discussed Moby-Dick.  Some twenty people had said they were coming, but I made the reservation for just eight, and that was the exact number that showed up!  I had to raise membership dues (for this and ROLT) from five to seven dollars because Meetup has raised their fees.  I suggested that after Our Mutual Friend we do The Yearling and (after Jane's input) Vanity Fair, and they seemed happy with that.

Afterward I went to see some silent comedy shorts at the Revue.  They had Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (the one with the huge waiter), an early Mabel Normand, one with Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery, and one with Charley Chase.

Tonight I went to choir practice, but only when I got there did I realize that there was no rehearsal this week. (D'OH!) Oh well, I like the routine of leaving the house on Mondays.

I found the classic Laurel & Hardy short Dirty Work on Youtube!  That's the one where they're chimney sweeps in a mad scientist's house. (The butler looks at them and mutters, "Somewhere an electric chair is waiting!" Don't think he likes them.) I also found the episode of The Cisco Kid that was given the What's Up, Tiger Lily? treatment on an episode of SCTV, but not the introduction where Edith Prickley says: "You like reruns?  Good!"

Toting time

Today I brought in my computer for examination at the Apple store in Yorkdale Mall.  It fit into my art portfolio, lined with a quilt, but was quite a bale to tote.  (I kept putting it down for a rest.  At times like these, I don't feel so bad about being unemployed.) Maybe we should have put it in a suitcase with wheels.

It turned out that the problem is with the hardware, and involves some parts that they no longer make!  I can still look for a repairman--I'd like to save my translation files--but it's over six years old and we'll have to get a new one pretty soon.  When I got home I felt like going back to bed!

Wednesday night we started blocking Don Giovanni at the opera.  The chorus has a small singing role but we have a lot of non-singing stuff to do.

Thursday night I saw Peter Jackson's third Hobbit movie, the one about the battle of the five armies except I'm not sure which armies they were exactly.  It was about what I expected:  lots of battles and special effects and new age stuff.

I've found a documentary series on Youtube that I've been hoping to find for a while:  the 1964 CBS production World War One, narrated by Robert Ryan. (I saw the greater part of the show on a PBS station some thirty years ago.) It's a pretty masterful treatment, with lots of old films and photos.

On Netflix I started looking at the fourth season of Good Times, after father John Amos left because Jimmie Walker's J.J. had come to dominate the show. (Mother Esther Rolle missed the fifth season for similar reasons.) Pretty cheesy, really.

Computer trouble

My computer's been on the blink since the weekend. (It's some sort of kernel panic trouble so it won't start up.) I got an appointment with a specialist at Yorkdale Mall on Saturday afternoon.  I've had to use the downstairs computer which Father and Moira normally use.

Saturday I finished Dicken's Hard Times.  Since then I've started reading the foreigners issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  It looks like a good one! Now it's time to start Our Mutual Friend.

Saturday I saw a documentary at the Bloor about the last days of South Vietnam in 1975 and the last-minute operation to evacuate refugees. (A few nights later I was dreaming about President Ford.) The American ambassador was in denial until very late in the day.

Sunday afternoon was the first event of John Snow's book club.  We talked about Dickens' Hard Times.  There were a lot of no-shows, but he still got six people.  The next event is Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, but I'll have to miss it because it's on the same day as the March ROLT Meetup.  John's also started a second book club that's going to read Dombey and Son, but I can only read one long Dickens book at a time and Our Mutual Friend has priority. (Too bad:  I do want to read Dombey and Son someday!)

Monday night at choir practice we started Giulio Caccini's "Ave Maria." (The only lines are "Ave Maria" and "Amen"!) Last night I had to leave opera rehearsal early because I wasn't feeling well.  But I'm feeling well enough to attend tonight.

A filling

"He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been--in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away--by the fervour of this reproach"--Hard Times

Monday night choir practice resumed.  We're doing a new number from Fiddler on the Roof  combining "Sunrise, Sunset" and "Sabbath Prayer."  Tuesday night opera rehearsal also resumed.  We managed to block out all the chorus scenes from Masked Ball.

Wednesday night I saw Charlie Chaplin's City Lights yet again, at the Event Screen with a Movie Meetup group.  Among his other talents, Chaplin was a brilliant music composer!

Today I went to the dentist and got a new filling in my lower left molars.  The main inconvenience was waiting for the freezing to wear off. (The other day someone in one of my Facebook groups asked us to name three things that are better than they used to be, and I wrote, "Dentistry, toilets and the internet.")

Recently I've been watching the new miniseries about Marco Polo on Netflix.  It's competent hokum, action-packed if rather improbable.  Some parts are sleazy, hard to follow and even too dark to see. (The 1982 miniseries was so cheesy that they lifted the whole Tibetan sequence from Tintin, including the bald monk levitating!) For all its lavishness, there's something oddly depressing about it:  I felt the same way about what I saw of The Tudors.

The Great White North

Yesterday afternoon was going to be the new year's first acting class, but it got cancelled.  Instead I saw the documentary In Search of Mozart at the Bloor.  Lots of Mozart music and discussion of his musical development.  Shame that it had only one showing and Moira missed it because she hadn't yet returned from Kingston.

This afternoon was the latest ROLT event.  A dozen people had said they were coming; a made a reservation for six; three showed up.  One of them was the author M.H. Callway, who read an exciting passage from her new novel Windigo Fire; the other was a Parisienne who's only been in Canada a few months.  I read Pauline Johnson's poem "The Song My Paddle Sings"; the passage in Jack London's The Call of the Wild where the dog Buck tows a thousand pounds of flour a hundred yards to win a bet for his master; the passage in L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle where Barney saves Valancy from an oncoming train; and the passage in Mazo de la Roche's Young Renny where Renny visits a farm and a woman reads tea leaves and tells his fortune.  Next month's topic will be folklore.

I've finished watching that Hollywood series on YouTube, except they don't have the second-last episode about Clara Bow and John Gilbert. (It had some BBC content that got it blocked.)

This last week I got careless about taking my Cipralex in the morning, and had some intense dreams.  One was this Harry Potter-Lord of the Rings type of adventure story where a race had to leave the surface of the earth when their enemies took over, and took a descending path lower and lower into the bowels of the earth, meeting many different species, until they came a bottom level with really primitive creatures, then started their return to the surface, planning to defeat their enemies when they arrived back.

Book hunt

Wednesday I was making the library rounds looking for books for Sunday's ROLT.  We had Jack London's The Call of the Wild at home, but it was a shorter version that didn't have the part I wanted. And we seemed to have two copies of L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, but it turned out that both were sold.

I found Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather at Deer Park, Mazo de la Roche's Young Renny at Forest Hill, and The Blue Castle at Lillian Smith.  But The Call of the Wild was harder:  I finally found it yesterday at Spadina Road when I figured out that it was in the juvenile fiction section instead of regular fiction!

Wednesday night I went to the Bickford Centre to help them set up the opera set.  But they had enough people already and I ended up standing around a lot, and left early.  On the way home the spine cover came off our copy of Hard Times, and Father put it back on the next day.  I thought we could just tape it on, but he glued it so I had to stop reading it for a while as the glue dried.

Last night I had a bout of insomnia and didn't get to sleep till past 4:00! (At such times I end up thinking about everything that makes me angry.) I didn't wake up till around 2:00 in the afternoon.  But on one of my Facebook groups a fellow Aspie said that he had a fit and ended up wandering around in the cold, which puts my problems in perspective.

That translated manga is terrific!  It combines a history of Japan in the 1920s and '30s with the author's personal story. (He was born in the early '20s.)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

The real cold weather returned yesterday.  Unfortunately, the previous day had been milder but it got cold really quick.  The big temperature swing, as I expected, gave me a big headache.  I was tempted to skip the memoir slam, which I almost never do, but managed to make it. (I was surprised that attendance wasn't significantly lower than usual!)

Last night I saw the documentary Finding Vivian Maier with a Movie Meetup group. (I might have skipped it if I hadn't RSVPed.) It's a fascinating story of a brilliant street photographer who worked as a nanny and whose work was only discovered after her death, by sheer accident.

Last night I dreamed about a non-existent movie with Lana Turner, whom I've never dreamed of before.  I also dreamed of visiting Las Vegas and not liking it.

Today I went out to the Victory Cafe to make a reservation for Sunday's ROLT Meetup, but it turned out that now they only take reservations online!  If I'd known that I could have been spared a freezing trip, yet it's always good to get out of the house.  I did visit the Beguiling nearby and bought a translated manga about Japan in the decade before it got into World War II.  Looks hard to put down. (Of course, with the manga format you always have to remember to look at panels and voice balloons from right to left, the opposite direction from the West.)

I've finished translating the story of the life of St. Philip of Neri, and started translating the Carl Sandburg poem "Yarns of the People."

INTO THE WOODS

"I've made my decision, which is not to decide"--Into the Woods

I finished Moby-Dick on New Year's Night.  The same night I was reading a Salon article about American decline which reminded me of Starbuck's famous line "Ahab beware of Ahab." Uncle Sam beware of Uncle Sam.

Now I've started reading Dickens' Hard Times for John Snow's book club. (Jane couldn't get into it.) It occurred to me that the "hard times" the title refers to are modern times.

This evening I went to see a movie with the Movie Meetup group. (I was glad to meet Jane, who's suggested Vanity Fair for my Classic Book Club.) We saw Rob Marshall's movie of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's curious musical fairy-tale pastiche with an oddly apocalyptic final act.  It was moderately entertaining, though none of the cast really stood out as singers.  The pacing was brisk enough:  I had to go to the washroom a couple of times, and I'm not sure how much I missed.  Reading Hard Times on the way home, I started to imagine how to adapt it into a musical!

I've finally quit the Facebook games Tribez and Megapolis.  And I'm also finished my latest bouts with Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga.  Now I've started two new games:  Tribez & Castlez and Transport Empire.  How long before I lose interest in them?