People's Climate March

King of Brobdingnag on the British people (based on Gulliver's description): "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth"--Gulliver's Travels

Yesterday afternoon I was in the People's Climate March.  We started at Allen Gardens and ended up west of Nathan Phillips Square.  A big First Nations drum led the procession and when they stopped to play it at Queen and University I was one of a group who joined hands in a circle and danced around it!

Last night I went to a Poetry Meetup at the Bampot tea room with an open mike. (I ordered a peppermint Nanaimo bar.) I was reckless enough to go second, and read aloud the first eighteen stanzas of my translation of Camoes' Lusiadas, which I'd read at the last Reading Out Loud Meetup.  There were several Palestinian-Canadians there.

The latest documentary series I've been watching on Acorn TV is Empire of the Tsars, about Russia's Romanov dynasty.

The other night I dreamed of a family movie with Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as the father.  When there was this scene with a teenage son going through an elaborate piercing and tattooing process, I wanted out.  I tried to leave the movie studio, but chose a door that was only for people coming in. (Last night I dreamed of imagining what would happen if Cinderella came to the ball dressed as a prince!)

For about a decade starting in January, 2003, I wrote in paper diaries. (I started out whimsically addressing them to a non-existent tweener girl called Dinah, but soon dropped that.)  I was thinking that in 2018 I'd start republishing them in a "15 Years Ago Today" blog like this one. [I'd also add some contemporary notes in brackets like these]

Shopping

T Minus 9 days!

Today I went out to the Apple store at Yorkdale Mall and bought an Iphone like Father has. It wasn't cheap, but it's a long-term purchase.  I also went to the Bay and bought a new pair of pajamas.

Earlier I was looking for a copy of Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm for John Snow's book club. I checked online and the Bay & Bloor Indigo and the Mt. Sinai Indigo Spiritual both had a copy. But when I got there, they'd both been sold! (Other members?) I guess I'll have to buy a copy in London after all.

I went to the Outsiders Meetup again this week, except that it's now called the Grace in Adversity Meetup.  We were talking about narcissistic parents, and I had to point out that my parents were two of the least narcissistic people I ever met! DeeAnn was wearing a nifty necklace strung with acrylic licorice allsorts.

I got to Granite Place an hour too early, as is my wont, and had to kill time by visiting Book City and the Deer Park library.  Book City didn't have Cold Comfort Farm, but I did pick up an eight-dollar copy of Taras Grescoe's Straphanger:  Saving Our Cities and Ourselves From the Automobile.

John Snow thinks that the line in my last post "stuff in the London theatre" has a Philistine sound. Really, I wish people would spend less time worrying about the connotations of language...

Eleven days to go!

I'm eleven days from my London flight.  Last night I was looking up some of the stuff on the London stage.  The Royal Opera has Verdi's Don Carlo and the English National Opera has a "semi-staged" version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel.  The National Theatre is playing the stage version of the Asperger's Syndrome novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (I've actually seen that in the cinemacast, but might as well see it again.) And they have a new version of Woyzeck at the Old Vic.

Saturday afternoon Betty Anne had another art walk but I thought it was going to be in the Junction area when it was actually near Dundas & Ossington!  Oh well, I got out of the house.

I've started digging the garden. (Well begun is half done!) I might even manage to plant some stuff before I leave.

I've started on a new Facebook game called Taonga.  It's another one of those games where you turn wild forest into a productive farm.  I'm already at Level Eight!

I'm now in the Brobdingnag section of Gulliver's Travels.  I was thinking some more about the rain:  if the raindrops were Lilliputian in size, rain would have been a fine mist for Gulliver. But if they were regular (which seems more likely), floods would be very common there!

At the memoir group today Nancy mentioned that her father used to quote to her the Tom Swift line: "You bounder,  I shall thrash you within an inch of your life!"

Another short post today.  Sometimes the juices don't flow so lushly...

Tom Swift

What could possibly go wrong?

"Tom was soon at Mansburg, and going to the post-office handed in the letter for registry. Bearing in mind his father's words, he looked about to see if there were any suspicious characters, but the only person he noticed was a well-dressed man, with a black mustache, who seemed to be intently studying the schedule of the arrival and departure of the mails.

"'Do you want the receipt for the registered letter sent to you here or at Shopton?' asked the clerk of Tom. 'Come to think of it though, it will have to come here, and you can call for it.  I'll have it returned to Mr. Barton Swift, care of general delivery, and you can get it the next time you are over,' for the clerk knew Tom.

"'That will do,' answered our hero, and as he turned away from the window he saw that the man who had been inquiring about the mails was regarding him curiously.  Tom thought nothing of it at the time, but there came an occasion when he wished that he had taken more careful note of the well-dressed individual.  As the youth passed out of the outer door he saw the man walk over to the registry window"
--Tom Swift and His Motorcycle

Last night I saw Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (for the third time, I think) with the History Discussion Group. Miriam from the Vintage Meetup was there. Anthony Quinn steals the show! Since this was the early '50s, the role of the U.S. in the Mexican Revolution is predictably glossed over.

On the way over to Debi's place, in the pouring rain, I was reading Gulliver's Travels.  I couldn't help wondering what Gulliver would do when it rained--building him a shelter or a raincoat would tax Lilliput's resources!

I found a very interesting website at http://www.damninteresting.com .  It has articles on subjects like the life of Ulysses Grant and the development of the Korean alphabet. (I found out about it from the Pocket Hits newsletter.)

I've started reading the ebook Tom Swift and His Motorcycle. This is the original Tom Swift from about a hundred years ago, not Tom Swift Jr. from the '50s who built rocket ships and sonic boom traps.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

"I swear to you, I'll get him!"--the third North & South miniseries

I've started reading Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels for the Classic Book Club.  Now that I think of it, the book's a very original combination of genres: sea story, foreign adventure, acute and often vulgar satire, and science fiction with its moral element.

Monday I saw the third North & South miniseries, set in the post-Civil War era and the cheesiest of all.  At least it was only half as long as the others!

Today I finally got my taxes done. (It isn't like me to leave them this long--I guess I've been preoccupied.) It's easier now that we've put my money in a ten-year deposit, and I did the whole thing online.  Now I'll want to dig the back yard garden before I leave for London in a couple of weeks.

Tonight I went to an Outsiders Meetup.  Lots of talk about how people are either troopers, players or outsiders.  I had to admit that I don't even care if I'm on the outside looking in!

Last night I dreamed of moving furniture around in my room in our old Sackville house, with the blue carpet getting distorted.

Depuis le Jour

Last night I dreamed about one of my favorite opera arias, "Depuis le Jour" from Gustave Charpentier's Louise. (I also dreamed of being in an airport and not knowing where to go...) Some years back I saw Aria, a movie with about a dozen famous directors putting famous opera arias to music.  Most of it was junk, but there was one wonderful bit:  Derek Jarman's "Depuis le Jour"!  I'll have to find his Caravaggio movie someday.

Yesterday was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup.  I've moved the location for my Meetup events to the Robarts Library on the U. of T. campus because the previous place was hard to find. The new place is a bit noisy, but in good weather it'll be easy to move outdoors.

This month's topic was the always reliable poetry, and the event was titled "Rhymes for Our Times." I read Burns' "To a Field Mouse," Frost's "Home Burial," "Le Morte d'Arthur" from Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and William Cowper's "John Gilpin," which my mother liked, especially the verse "Said John, 'It is my wedding day and all the world would stare, If wife should dine at Edmonton, and I should dine at Ware.'"  And I read the first eighteen stanzas of my translation of Luis Vaz de Camoes' Lusiades!

On the weekend I saw the second North and South miniseries, set in the Civil War. (Jean Simmons was really the best actor in it.) I really didn't buy the final reconciliation theme.  Biggest historical goof: the news of Lincoln being shot being announced in the daytime, when everyone knows he was shot in the evening!  Biggest casting howler:  Wayne Newton as the commander of the Confederate military prison!

My newest guilty pleasure

"I am not in denial!"--Six Feet Under

"Make sure he marries you--first!"--North and South

On this long Easter weekend some people binge-watch on TV. Through the miracle of Youtube, I've just been watching North and South, the 1985 miniseries about a South Carolina plantation heir (Patrick Swayze, who went on to Dirty Dancing and Ghost) and a Pennsylvania foundry heir (James Read, who went on to, uh, the sequels) who become friends at West Point, as well as their families, in the years before the Civil War.  I watched the whole nine hours over two days, and I guess it's a guilty pleasure.

Produced by David Wolper, who did the overrated Roots, it's definitely on the cheesy side. (Tom Shales' review in The Washington Post: "North and South is incredibly stupid television, for people who move their lips as they watch TV.") The acting isn't so great:  David Carradine is an especially hilarious villain.  Georg Stanford Brown, as an escaped slave, seems to be on a different show (something slower and more serious). There are also cameos by doddering legends like Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor.  It's the kind of show that has a pair of southern sisters, where one is the blond nice girl and the other is the brunette bad girl.  I kept guessing what was about to happen, of course.

Yet I like this sort of story. I wonder how I'd deal with a friend who owned slaves. (Would my principles trump friendship?) Read has an abolitionist sister (Kirstie Alley) who starts out as a pain in the neck and ends up an unhinged fanatic, but at least she tried to do something about the slavery problem.  Martin Luther King wrote about "the fierce urgency of now," yet it must have been twice as urgent back when millions of people were living and dying as slaves.  There's a nice musical theme by Bill Conti, along the lines of his Dynasty theme.  And I'd forgotten how pretty Lesley-Anne Down was! I'll probably watch the sequels too.

Wednesday night I went to a Vintage Meetup at the Tot Cat Cafe, a cafe for cat-owners!  Last night I went on an Art Walk Meetup, the first in months.  I've also put aside Lapham's Quarterly and started reading Gulliver's Travels.

Enough SIX FEET UNDER!

We just saw the last episode of the third season of Six Feet Under.  We probably won't see the last two, because I recall that the show jumped the shark at the start of the fourth season.  I could write a whole post about what went wrong with it, and of course will.

Remember American Beauty, the movie written by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball?  The story involved Kevin Spacey being attracted to blond teenager Mena Suvari, though in the end he didn't go all the way with her. (Typical tease story.) In the fourth season Claire meets a blond lesbian at art school and gets attracted to her, but in the end doesn't go all the way. In case you didn't notice the similarity, she's played by Mena Suvari! That art school milieu was kind of interesting in the third season, but in the fourth season it gets unpleasant.

Claire finally creates a work of art that sells, which is a photographic portrait except that you replace the eyes with black with points of light like a night sky.  It's remarkably ugly imagery, further proof that the art market has no taste.  The catch is that Claire swiped the idea from her loathed, pitiful ex-boyfriend Russell, to his anger.  If I'd been Russell, I would have paid Claire not to tell people that such an eyesore was my idea!

Keith has become a celebrity bodyguard, the sort of thing you do when you're running out of ideas.  Ruth's new husband (James Cromwell, always a welcome addition) has a daughter who hates him, and they get a package in the mail full of poop! That's Alan Ball's idea of a clever development.  

The musical numbers and surreal scenes and offbeat touches that seemed original in the show's beginning seem old by the end. The low point came in the last season after Claire had to get in a job in a bank after she left art school and her education money got cut off.  Her panty hose is uncomfortable so she sings "You Ride up My Thighs" to the tune of "You Light up My Life." Sux to be her!

Spring fever

Well, not quite spring fever.  But the warm weather has finally arrived, and now I can open my windows!

Friday night I went to another Vintage Meetup.  This time I wore a gray blazer I found in my closet which I don't think I'd ever worn before!  Miriam and I saw the Marion Davies silent movie When Knighthood Was in Flower at the Revue, in the silent film festival.  It's easy to forget that William Randolph Hearst's mistress did have talent--she influenced Lucille Ball--though she ended up squandering it in grotesque '30s musicals.

The movie was about the sister of Henry VIII, who was married to the doddering King of France for a year, then chose her own husband and was Lady Jane Grey's grandmother.  I got curious about the Grey line, which would have inherited the throne in 1714 but for the Hanovers, and looked up some genealogical tables online.  It turns out that the present heirs are in Princess Diana's family!

Sunday afternoon I attended John Snow's book club, where we discussed Good Morning, Midnight.  Afterward I went to the ESL Meetup again.

I've now started reading the spring issue of Lapham's Quarterly, whose theme is discovery.

History Discussion Group

Tuesday night I saw the James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" at the Revue.  My favorite Baldwin quote is "Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free.  The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people."

Tonight the History Discussion Group talked about the Caravaggio book and our favorite art.  I printed out stuff like Caravaggio's still life fruit:

Joseph Wright's "An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump" (looks a bit like Caravaggio, doesn't it?):

John Nash's Western Front painting "Over the Top":

Which I compared to Breughel's "Hunters in the Snow":

Velazquez' "The Triumph of Bacchus":

Gainsborough's portrait of ballerina Giovanna Bacelli, who became the mistress of the Duke of Dorset (famous for his role in developing the sport of cricket and being Britain's last ambassador to France before the Revolution broke out):

Winterhalter's rather rococo portrait of Empress Eugenie with her Ladies in Waiting (she has that faraway Spanish look!):

Renoir's "Le Bal a Bougival" (See how Renoir depicts motion with the whirl of the dress--I wish I was the man there!):

I also discussed a couple of photographs, including Dorothea Lange's famous portrait of a migrant worker mother:

And this photo of V-E Day London:

I finished Good Morning, Midnight this morning, then reread Orwell's The Animal Farm in a single day.  For maybe the first time Father and Moira are ahead of me in watching Six Feet Under!

ESL Meetup

Apostrophe to an employer: "Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple--no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it?  You must be able to despise the people you exploit"--Good Morning, Midnight

Yesterday afternoon I went to an ESL Meetup, for foreigners learning English.  I met several Chinese and Koreans and Brazilians. (One Chinese thought that "past" and "passed" were pronounced differently--that's one of those things Anglophones hardly think about!) We were given lists of English idioms and it was fun to explain them.  For "jail bait," I told them that Britney Spears acts like jail bait. For "laughing all the way to the bank," I cited Kim Kardashian! Afterwards I bought a copy of Gulliver's Travels at the Chapters-Indigo at Yonge & Eglinton.

I finished going through the pictures online that Francine Prose talked about in her Caravaggio book.  I was especially impressed by his still life of unusually blemished fruit: looking at them, I wanted to eat them, more so than perfect fruit. I couldn't help noticing that the book could have used better editing.  Rarefy and Velazquez are spelled "rarify" and "Velasquez," and Prose describes Caravaggio's "Madonna in Ecstasy" as having a non-existent skull in her lap. (She must have been thinking of a de la Tour madonna from 1640!)

GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT

"What's he like?  Oh, he's the real English type.  Very nice, very, very chic, the real English type, le businessman....  I thought, 'Oh, my God, I know what these people mean when they say the real English type'"--Good Morning, Midnight

I've started reading Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight for John Snow's book club.  It's a "stream of consciousness" sort of novel about an Englishwoman down on her luck in 1930s Paris. I was impressed right from the start: she has just the right balanced touch, downbeat but not maudlin, sharply observed but not clinical.  On the second page she writes of walking around Mecklenburgh Square in London, which is now the location of Goodenough College, where I spent the best eight months of my life twenty years ago, and will be staying again next month!

Though it wasn't widely read at the time, I couldn't help wondering if it influenced Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, at least in the title? And I think Rhys wrote a line I can't find that seems to be a reference to Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose."

Last night I went out to an art class, but it seemed to be cancelled.  Oh well, I left my addy for their mailing list.  The place had a California Gold Rush address:  1849 Danforth Avenue!(I often remember addresses from the year they correspond to.) I braved the snow to get there, but it was worth getting out of the house anyway.

Today I walked down to the Sobey's near Dupont & Shaw to buy their Friday fish and chips special, as well as their coconut cream pie.  Moira was really grateful that I went out in this unseasonal weather. (It's starting to become a routine:  I did it last week too, though I forgot the pie.) On the way there I stopped at the ATM and found out I'd got my first ODSP deposit!