Sunday was Read Out Loud. It's September, so I did banned and challenged books again. Someone was reading from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (I should read that again someday!) and someone else was reading a rant by journalist Oriana Fallaci. I read the chapter in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye where he's travelling on a train and bullshitting the mother of a classmate, a section from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that was reprinted in the Lapham's Quarterly spying issue, and the chapter in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn where the judge tries to reform Huck's father.
Tuesday was the first Toronto City Opera rehearsal. We started on Bizet's Carmen, and did pretty well with it. (We did it three years ago, so I guess it's still fresh in our memories.) This year I'm singing tenor for the first time, and Beatrice is grateful: the chorus has three members this year, as opposed to none last year!
Andriy is now charging $50 per lesson, which is reasonable since we go on for an hour and a half! (He'd go on even longer if I didn't get tired.) We've mostly been doing Gluck's "O del Mio Dolce Ardor," and he suggested the exercise of singing the song in vowels alone, without consonants, which seems pretty useful. The other day we started on Pergolesi's "Nina" too. It's actually just a guess that Pergolesi wrote it: if they had no idea it would be a folk song!
Last night I went to a new Book Club Meetup at the Bedford Academy. It turned out that I was the only boy there! (I quipped, "Book clubs are a good place to meet girls!") This was just a meeting to discuss what to read next, and I suggested Maria Chapdelaine since I just finished it. Denise is the organizer, and I invited her to join my Toronto Bookshelf group on Facebook.
On Facebook today someone mentioned a report that a public school employee quit because she was forced to deny a school meal to a kid who couldn't pay. I pointed out that that's the sort of thing I've been reading about in the Great Depression history Ten Lost Years!
The other night I dreamed about being in Glasgow (where I spent a year almost thirty years ago) and remembered an actual toy store called The Jolly Giant! I also dreamed about travelling around in a London Routemaster bus with double deckers, like Cliff Richard did in the movie musical Summer Holiday, but in this dream it was painted blue.
The other night I dreamed about being in Glasgow (where I spent a year almost thirty years ago) and remembered an actual toy store called The Jolly Giant! I also dreamed about travelling around in a London Routemaster bus with double deckers, like Cliff Richard did in the movie musical Summer Holiday, but in this dream it was painted blue.
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