Twitter

Now that I'm on Twitter, Moira gave me a big list of prominent Tweeters to follow--people like Bradley Whitford and Gary Shteyngart. I'm also following people like Stephen Fry, who said the solar eclipse looked like the Apple computers logo, and Michiko Kakutani.  

I've also added quite a few newspapers and magazines, because they often post interesting articles and reports. Moira enjoys the threads of comments that can accumulate on some entries.

Today I had lunch with John Snow at the Schnitzel Hub.  I said goodbye to the waitress but almost forgot to say goodbye to John!

Tonight I saw the documentary Dawson City:  Frozen Time at the Bloor.  It's about a cache of over 500 reels of silent film they found in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, almost forty years ago.  

What a story!  Dawson City was the "end of the line" for many movies, appearing there years after their first release, so distributors often wouldn't pay to have them returned.  The local Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce man, in charge of such dealings, thus ended up with a basement full of boxes containing such films and was eventually told to get rid of them. Many such films had been burned or thrown in the river, but the local recreation centre was filling in its former swimming pool so the rink that covered the area would have a more even surface.  

The guy let the boxes of films be used as landfill there, and one day, long after the recreation centre had been torn down, someone was digging there and turned up some films. They contain varying degrees of water damage, but many of them would otherwise be completely lost! (The documentary also tells a lot about the Klondike gold rush and Dawson City's later history.)

MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME

"Listen then to this ensemble of the steeples; diffuse over it the murmur of half a million people, the everlasting plaint of the river, the boundless breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills in the distance like so many vast organs, immersing in them, as in a demitint, all in the central concert that would otherwise be too raucous or too sharp, and then say whether you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling than this tumult of bells and chimes, this furnace of music, these ten thousand voices of brass, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high--than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra--than this symphony as loud as a tempest"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"How do I get in?" "That's easy.  Pick a fight"--Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Friday I saw George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Dawna (for the second time).  It's all over the place, but cumulatively pretty fun.  It owes a lot to movies like Lawrence of Arabia, and the musical score, also by Maurice Jarre often sounds similar.  I ought to see the Charlize Theron version someday!

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Globetrotters Meetup at the Fox and Firkin near Wellesley Station.  The organizer is an Indian from Delhi, and there were also a Ukranian and a Romanian.  I've done enough travelling for a bit, but I do like talking about foreign countries!

This afternoon was the Classic Book Club Meetup, where we discussed Sons and Lovers. There were six people there, including one who thought she was going to the Reading Out Loud Meetup! But I persuaded her to join us anyway, and she made a good contribution.

I've been looking at some of the women on the Zoosk dating site, but so far there aren't many whose interests overlap with mine:  most of them list few interests, and some show none at all!

I've joined up on Twitter at my sister's urging. (I chose the site name Kermit Higby, after a rival detective who appeared on an episode of The Rockford Files!) My first message was a link to a National Film Board cartoon of the song "Log Driver's Waltz."

https://twitter.com/KermitHigby

Photographer's assistant

"If Gringoire had lived in our day, how justly he would have kept to the middle, between the classic and the romantic!...  But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, and that's a pity.  His absence leaves a void which, today, is sorely recognized"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

On the "Let them eat cake" quote: "That's ridiculous!  I would never say that!"--Marie Antoinette

Wednesday I was a photographer's assistant! Midwife was taking photos of Miriam in 1940s clothes and I helped out. (What's the story, Morning Glory?) This was near Midwife's apartment in the downtown YWCA building, and we did it on a rooftop there. I held the reflector to focus light on Miriam's face when the sun was behind the clouds, and moved her hair back with the pointed end of a comb when it got in her face.  It was pretty fun.

Wednesday night I went with Miriam's group and saw Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (for the second time) at a Ladies of Burlesque show at the Royal. Marie Antoinette is one of history's big scapegoats!

Yesterday I went with Midwife to a costume warehouse in New Toronto to return those '40s clothes.  She'd ask if I could come in case her daughter couldn't make it and she needed my help.  Her daughter did make it, but I went anyway for the excursion. (We rented a van.)

Solar eclipse

"I tell you, sir, it's the end of the world. Never has there been loose such an unruly mob of students!  It's the accursed inventions of the age that are ruining everything--the artillery, the muskets, the cannons, and above all the printing press, that scourge brought from Germany"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Monday afternoon during the solar eclipse I was inside the Lillian Smith library with the memoir group. (Father made a clever gizmo out of a computer crate for seeing the crescent sunbeam.) Oh well, maybe the Imp of the Perverse would have made me look directly into it...

Now that I've finished Sons and Lovers, I got some new books there.  Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame I'm reading for John Snow's book club.  Machiavelli's The Prince I'm reading for the History Meetup.  And I also got an annotated edition of the manuscript Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder's first attempt at telling her story.

On the first page of Hunchback, Hugo indirectly reveals that he's started writing the novel at the time of the July Revolution.  No doubt he did so to remind his readers that the age of Paris mobs was far from over!

Hunchback and Prince are rather appropriate books to be reading at the same time, since they're both about the difficulties of the Renaissance.

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

"It hurt him so, that things had lost their reality.  The first snowdrops came.  He saw the tiny drop-pearls among the grey.  They would have given him the liveliest emotion at one time.  Now they were there, but they did not seem to mean anything.  In a few moments they would cease to occupy that place, and just the space would be, where they had been.  Tall, brilliant tram-cars ran along the street at night.  It seemed almost a wonder they should trouble to rustle backwards and forwards. 'Why trouble to go tilting down to Trent Bridges?' he asked of the big trams.  It seemed they just as well might not be as be"--Sons and Lovers

Yesterday afternoon I saw High Plains Drifter with Dawna (for the second time, except that the first time was on a black & white TV decades ago so I couldn't appreciate the scene where the whole town was painted red!). It's the first of the "avenging angel" westerns directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.  We also saw an episode of his TV western Rawhide--Dawna recognizes every actor who appeared on the first Star Trek series!

High Plains Drifter is the one where stranger Eastwood comes to a town whose marshal was whipped to death by three outlaws who are now getting out of jail, and the town's afraid they'll return for vengeance so they hire him to defend the town and give him a blank cheque, but at the last minute he leaves them to face the outlaws alone, then returns that night and kills them after all, and he's the ghost of the marshal who got whipped to death!

This afternoon was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup, with the topic of humorous writing. (I titled the event "Jocularity.") I read the part of Huckleberry Finn where the King works a camp meeting; the part of Frank McCourt's Teacher Man describing his first two days teaching school; and James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  This time we read in Robarts Library's food court.

I just finished Sons and Lovers with a week to spare.  The sensitive hero's relationship with his protective mother reminded me a bit of my relationship with my mother.

NABUCCO

"And after such an evening they both were very still, having known the immensity of passion.  They felt small, half afraid, childish, and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their innocence and realized the magnificence of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of humanity.  It was for each of them an initiation and a satisfaction.  To know their own nothingness, to know the tremendous living flood which carried them always, gave them rest within themselves.  If so great a magnificent power could overwhelm them, identify them altogether with itself, so that they knew they were only grains in the tremendous heave that lifted every grass-blade its little height, and every tree, and living thing, then why fret about themselves? They could let themselves be carried by life, and they felt a sort of peace each in the other. There was a verification which they had had together.  Nothing could nullify it, nothing could take it away; it was almost their belief in life"--Sons and Lovers

This afternoon I saw the Met production of Verdi's Nabucco at the Yonge & Eglinton, with the great Placido Domingo in the title role.  That's the one where Nabucco captures Jerusalem but his daughter falls in love with a Judean and converts, but his other daughter schemes to take over when he goes out of his head... The Slaves' Chorus was so well-received that they did it a second time! (I saw that happen with "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" at the National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in London twenty years ago.)

I've just been rereading The First Four Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder's unfinished addition to her Little House series, describing her newlywed life.  It's only half as long as the other books:  I have a feeling that she gave up on it because it brought back too many painful memories. Three of their first four crops were lost--including a $3000 bumper crop wrecked in a hailstorm--her husband suffered paralysis from a combination of diphtheria and overwork, she lost their second child shortly after his birth, and their house burnt down.  The good old days...

The Crown keeps getting even better! (They've now got to the part in the mid-1950s when my parents were in England.) As the Queen, Claire Foy's polite poker face reminds me of a geisha.

THE CROWN

At the theatre: "The drama continued.  He saw it all in the distance, going on somewhere; he did not know where, but it seemed far away inside him.  He was Clara's white heavy arms, her throat, her moving bosom.  That seemed to be himself.  Then away somewhere the play went on, and he was identified with that also.  There was no himself.  The grey and black eyes of Clara, her bosom coming down on him, her arm that he held gripped between his hands, were all that existed.  Then he felt himself small and helpless, her towering in her force above him"--Sons and Lovers

We've started watching the royal drama The Crown on Netflix.  It's a handsome production and pretty believable. (The Duke of Windsor privately referred to Elizabeth II as "Shirley Temple"!)

Saturday afternoon I saw some more spy shows with Dawna: The Man From UNCLE, Mission: Impossible and Get Smart. (The last was one of my favorite shows when I was young, though I have to admit such '60s comedies were rather sexist.)

I was going to watch the meteor shower in Christie Pits with Miriam's group Saturday night, but the webpage said we'd meet at the Black Rock Cafe at 997 Bloor St. West and when I got there it turned out the address was wrong!  I went home and it turned out that the address was 977 Bloor St. West.  So I went there but couldn't find the rest of the group.

Last night Miriam and I were going to see West Side Story at Christie Pits' outdoor screening and then go out for Korean soup again.  But she wasn't really up to the movie, so we went straight to the soup.

Zoosk

"She put her hands over him, on his hair, on his shoulders, to feel if the raindrops fell on him.  She loved him dearly.  He, as he lay with his face on the dead pine-leaves, felt extraordinarily quiet.  He did not mind if the raindrops came on him:  he would have lain and got wet through:  he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond, near and quite lovable.  This strange, gentle reaching-out to death was new to him"--Sons and Lovers

Yesterday Betty-Anne's art walk returned to Queen Street West. One place we went to was a shop for cocktail paraphernalia!

That night at a midnight showing (well, 23:00 anyway) the Carleton had a special screening of the Godzilla classic Destroy All Monsters in honor of the guy inside the monster suit who just died.  I was thinking of seeing it, but my headache came back and it looked too noisy for me.

On a whim, I joined the dating website Zoosk. (Hope over experience?) For my profile I wrote:

I'm a late bloomer. I love classic books, music, movies and TV. My favourite journey is to London, England.
I like reading, especially history. (Fairy tales and comic books appeal to me, even at my age!) And walking is one of my favourite activities.
I'm politically conscious. There are a lot of things in the world that make me angry. (With Donald Trump, however, I've gone beyond anger...) I believe in justice, though in practice I'm skeptical about realizing it.

For my perfect match I wrote:

I like someone who's a good listener, has a sense of humor, and cares about important things as passionately as I do.

For my perfect date I wrote:

A good first date would be just going out for ice cream or doughnuts. Later, karaoke would be fun! Or a movie: my idea of a good romantic movie is Disney's LADY & THE TRAMP, the John Wayne-Claire Trevor western STAGECOACH or even John LeCarre's THE CONSTANT GARDENER. After that, who knows? =)

The good thing about this site is that you get to choose from a wide range of available interests to add to your profile:  people, books, movies, TV shows, sports and such.  And also observe other people's profiles:  I don't think I can date a woman whose interests include the stupid, shameless movie Life Is Beautiful...

Headache!

"Mrs. Morel felt as if her heart would break for him.  At this rate she knew he would not live.  He had that poignant carelessness about himself, his own suffering, his own life, which is a form of slow suicide.  It almost broke her heart.  With all the passion of her strong nature she hated Miriam for having in this subtle way undermined his joy.  It did not matter to her that Miriam could not help it.  Miriam did it, and she hated her"--Sons and Lovers

These are a couple of those pictures Midwife took of me last week.  She wants to do some more once she knows my clothes size!

The other night I got a big headache that's only now gone away.  I usually read while on the TTC but I couldn't do it so much yesterday.

Monday night we saw the last episode of Bloodline.  The last three episodes, after the trial, weren't as good. (Too much confusing surrealism...)

Yesterday I met Midwife and Miriam.  Miriam's been reading my articles too, and likes them. My next one will be about how I was born on the day of a big Aquarian stellium! (I'm too rationalistic for astrology, really, but it is kinda fun.)

Last night I went to the Cross-Cultural Meetup at Page One near the Ryerson campus.  I had to leave a bit early because of my headache.

I've made Dawna's Classic TV a joint event with my Reading Out Loud Meetup.  Since my group has over 4000 members, that's bound to increase interest in hers!

THE WILD, WILD WEST

"He looked at his mother.  Her blue eyes were watching the cathedral quietly.  She seemed again to be beyond him.  Something in the eternal repose of the uplifted [Lincoln] cathedral, blue and noble against the sky, was reflected in her, something of the fatality.  What was, was.  With all his young will he could not alter it.  He saw her face, the skin still fresh and pink and downy, but crow's-feet near her eyes, her eyelids steady, sinking a little, her mouth always closed with disillusion; and there was on her the same eternal look, as if she knew fate at last. He beat against it with all the strength of his soul"--Sons and Lovers

"I love being a grandmother.  It's like eating all the ice cream you want and never getting fat!"--Bloodline

Thursday night was the History Meetup, where the subject was modern China.  Just three people came, but one of them talked a lot and that was worth quite a bit.

This afternoon I saw three episodes of The Wild, Wild West with Dawna.  That show was The Man From UNCLE on the frontier, as crazy as it sounds. In one episode they took on a megalomaniac who wanted to create an independent state between the U.S. and Mexico and had stolen the first copy of the United States constitution; in another someone tried to shoot the Mexican president and they had to figure out who was really behind it; in the other one the dwarfish villain Dr. Loveless faked his death and pretended to be his own neurosurgeon uncle.

By today's standards it was a cheesy show, especially the de rigeur fight scenes.  Watching several episodes, you'll notice that the sets got recycled. (Big Brad's Bar seemed to be a chain with franchises all over the west!) One detail that bugs me is their getting orders from Washington by pigeon post: how can a carrier pigeon track down a moving railroad car?

Enough on my plate?

"Spring was the worst time.  He was changeable, intense and cruel.  So he decided to stay away from her.  Then came the hours when he knew Miriam was expecting him. His mother watched him growing restless. He could not go on with his work.  He could do nothing.  It was as if something were drawing his soul out towards Willey Farm. Then he put on his hat and went, saying nothing.  And his mother knew he was gone. And as soon as he was on the way he sighed with relief.  And when he was with her he was cruel again"--Sons and Lovers

Yesterday, through some bureaucratic SNAFU, the room at Lillian Smith library where the memoir group usually meets was taken for some conference.  They did let us meet in the reading area, but we only did one topic since we couldn't talk too loud. Since next week is a holiday, I brought home the can of subject cards to remove superfluous items and maybe add some more of my own.

After two weeks, I'm halfway through Sons and Lovers.  When I'm finished that, I'll have to read The Prince for my History Meetup and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for John's book club. I'm way behind in Lapham's Quarterly.

And there are all those Ebooks that I've started reading.  I just finished a history of the California gold rush the other day.  But I've also started a biography of Walt Disney, a history of the Versailles palace, a history of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and The Boo, Pat Conroy's biography of the fatherly assistant commander at the Citadel military school. (I liked My Losing Season, his memoir of playing basketball at the Citadel.)

In addition to all that, today I went to the Gladstone library and borrowed Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie. (Just because I felt like reading it again!)

Someone said I don't like people, which may be true to some extent. (Linus Van Pelt: "I love mankind--it's people I can't stand!") He mentioned that I rarely talk about people in this blog, but part of the reason is that I worry about what people may think if they read about themselves here.  Which is why he shall go nameless!