VICTORIA AND ABDUL

Doctor: "I didn't spend six years at Edinburgh University to look at Indian dicks!"--Victoria and Abdul

Thursday night I saw Stephen Frears' Victoria and Abdul with someone from the History Meetup at the Yonge & Eglinton. It was cute if predictable. These British movies often have great supporting casts, and I spotted Julian Wadham as a Royal butler!

I'm now reading Michael Wood's India for the History Meetup. The first chapter is already interesting, though I'm still getting over my cold and not reading much.

These days I'm not doing much but going online and following Twitter.  The Bernie Sanders haters are really rabid!  I'm also watching Damages in the evening--Wallace Shawn turned up in one episode!--but even watching a TV show is a bit of a chore.

I was going to attend a Poetry Meetup tonight but saw fit to cancel.  Dawna and I were going to see the movie Taps, but that was easy to postpone a week. Next week there'll be a lot of stuff that's hard to avoid, and I hope I'll be in better shape.

Still under the weather

This is a persistent cold!  I had to miss the memoir group yesterday, and tonight I'll have to miss opera rehearsal.  At times like this I feel like I could stay in bed for the rest of my life!  Last night it took forever to get to sleep.  I just hope I'm over it by Thursday night to see Victoria and Abdul with the History Meetup.

Saturday I saw George Miller's second Mad Max movie The Road Warrior (for the second time) with Dawna.  It rocks! Bruce Spence's jokey helicopter pilot makes a good sidekick for Mel Gibson's stolid hero.

Sunday I discussed Jack Kerouac's On the Road with the Classic Book Club.  I was late finishing it:  the day before on the way home I went into No Frills to get some more pomelos and left the book in there!  But I finished it in the Robarts Library just before we went into the food court for the discussion.  

Afterward I went out to Margo's place north of Bathurst & Steeles for a fall party.  But I got lost and by the time I got there I was pretty worn out.  Lucky there was someone to give me a lift to the subway afterward!

We've started watching the DVD of the third season of Damages. Martin Short has a straight role as a lawyer!

Relocating

"Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cab-drivers and border rats wandered around, looking for opportunities. There weren't many; it was too late.  It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air... Just beyond you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night...  Just across the street Mexico began.  We looked with wonder.  To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico"--On the Road

Joan Blondell (seeing Claire Dodd's backside): "There's a familiar sight!"--Footlight Parade

I've changed the location for my Meetups.  Some people complained that the Robarts Library was too confusing for them to find me. (I put directions up the steps to the second floor on the webpage, but a lot of people evidently ignored them.) So now we'll meet at Scallywag's Restaurant, which has a huge space on the top floor.

Today I saw Lloyd Bacon's Warner Brothers Footlight Parade again at the Robarts Library theatre with the Movie Meetup group. (I was about ten minutes late, because I'd convinced myself it was at the Reference Library!) It's nice to see James Cagney in a role using his hoofer talents, and Joan Blondell's one of my favorite '30s leading ladies.  Lots of great pre-Production Code dialogue.

The library book with the poem "Tam O'Shanter" has a whole glossary of Scots words in Robert Burns' poems.  I'm going to write them all down for translating poems into Scots. (Father told me the other day that Mother's father kept a book of Burns poems at his bedside, along with the Bible and a bottle of whiskey.  I'd never heard that before!)

Hope I get over this cold soon!

Backlog

"We were telling these things and both sweating.  We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat.  At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the it of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives"--On the Road

Just recently I accumulated a huge backlog of unread emails. About a third of them are Meetup and Twitter notifications.  A lot are from activist groups--NDP, environmentalists, animal welfare--with links to online petitions for me to sign. (They also ask for money, but rarely get it.) 

I need to get a new computer mouse one of these days:  too often when I click on a link, it'll do two clicks!  That's a disadvantage with my email, because sometimes I'll trash two when I only wanted to trash one. So I go to the trash and look for the one I trashed without reading. That isn't so hard if it's the same day, but emails from earlier days are harder to find.

Monday night we finished the second season of Damages. (I'm still figuring out the whole plot!) Timothy Olyphant also had a good role.

Last night the opera started The Magic Flute.  But they're using a different translation from what's printed in the scores and we had to write it in, and I didn't have a pen!  Lucky for me I have such a great memory...

Next Sunday is my book club, and I still haven't finished On the Road.  Tonight just when I was going to start reading it again, I couldn't find it!  But it turned up at last under a shirt.

I hope I'm not getting a cold. Today I bought some pomelo grapefruit.  

Don't open that door!

Hitchhiking on a truck: "And what a driver-- a great big tough truckdriver [sic] with popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig under way and paid hardly any attention to me.  So I could rest my tired soul a little, for one of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn't make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you're going all the way and don't plan to sleep in hotels"--On the Road

On a potential US Secretary of Energy: "Trust me, his only loyalty is to the Capitalist Party!"--Damages

Saturday afternoon with Dawna I saw two episodes of The Monkees and two of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Monkees were the first ersatz pop group-- my mother hated them!-- in a mildly goofy show. (There was a funny bit during a hotel caper when one of them entered a linen closet and ran off with a towel, and they showed the caption "Everyone does it"!) The Dick Van Dyke Show is still fairly funny today, and Mary Tyler Moore as his wife does a lot for it.

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup with scary writing the topic:  I titled the event "Don't Open That Door!" Eleven people came!  One of them was an American opera singer now performing in the COC's Arabella, who read a pretty good scary poem he'd written some years back.  

I read "Tam O'Shanter"; a story within a story in Richard Adams' rabbit adventure Watership Down, in which the rabbit hero Elalairah goes to the Black Rabbit in charge of death and tries to sacrifice his life to save his starving people; and the last chapter of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set in a charnel house for the executed. There was a Lovecraft story, a science fiction story someone had written, and a poem by James Agee! (I also got one girl to read Poe's "The Raven.")

We met in the Robarts Library food court, where there was a Chinese woman called Wendy drawing sketches of everyone in the place!  That's mine at the top.

No Twitter for me today

"That [injured] thumb became symbol of Dean's final development.  He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it"--On the Road

Patty (to her teenage son's cougar girlfriend): "You'll hurt him, and I'll come to you and rip your face off!"--Damages

German strategy: "We'll pretend to retreat on all fronts..."--Europa Europa

Some feminists had a boycott of Twitter today in response to Rose McGowan being suspended for accusing Ben Affleck of lying about Harvey Weinstein.  So I stayed off Twitter today in support of them. (Or maybe it was to show I could go without Twitter for a day.)

Wednesday afternoon I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow a book of Robert Burns' poetry because I want to read "Tam O'Shanter" at Sunday's Reading Out Loud Meetup.  I borrowed the book, turned to the pages with the poem on the way home, and someone had torn them out! (Selfish...) Today I got another Burns book at the Maria Shchuka library.

Wednesday Moira was using the Metropass, so I used TTC tokens. But the Spadina streetcar's token-accepting machine wasn't working, and at the Spadina station that day the fare inspectors were active! Fortunately, they accepted my excuse.

Thursday night I watched Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa for the third time, screening the DVD at Debi's place. (Poor Debi has bronchitis!) That's the one about a teenage Jewish boy whose family flees Germany for Poland, then the Nazis invade Poland and he flees east to Soviet territory and a communist orphanage, then the Nazis invade Russia and he gets adopted by an unsuspecting German regiment and sent to a Nazi military school...  Great story, wonderful movie.

The one thing I don't like about Damages is VLA's theme song "When I am Through With You." (The same producers' Bloodline did better with Book of Fear's "The Water Lets You In.")

DAMAGES

"Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came.  This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there"--On the Road

We're now watching the second season of Damages.  It's an unpredictable show that keeps you guessing.  In the first season class-action lawyer Patty (a well-cast Glenn Close) took tycoon Ted Danson to the cleaners; in the second, she's after a polluting West Virginia CEO and gets shareholder Danson to sue him! William Hurt has a good role as a researcher playing both ends against the middle.

The central character is Ellen (Rose Byrne), a beginning lawyer working for Patty.  In the first season she was engaged to a doctor who got murdered, a crime for which she almost got framed.  In the second season she's out to nail the real killers, and they're after her too.  Also, she's working for the feds to help nail Patty, because Patty tried to have her killed in the first season for reasons I still haven't figured out. (Maybe it's all clear when you see it a second time!)

John and Kathrine came over for Thanksgiving and we feasted on vegan chili.

The number of my Twitter followers is steadily approaching 2000.

Refining Twitter

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof?  Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life"--On the Road

"You know, we should be thankful that we live in the United States." "That's what people in Poland say!"--Laugh-In

Thursday night was the History Meetup, where we discussed World War II.  One of the people there was a German woman whose father had been drafted at fourteen or so, and whose grandfather spent years as a Soviet POW.  Another was a Chinese guy whose father rose from a peasant to a colonel in China's Red Army.  Two or three people got into long exchanges.

This afternoon I saw a couple more episodes of Laugh-In with Dawna.  Mother hated the show, and I guess she had good taste.  It was full of lines like "That's as funny as a bumblebee in a nudist camp!"

I've been refining my list of Tweeters I'm following. (Opening the page with the whole list takes quite a while, so I got a system of putting my glasses case on the command key and my wallet on the down-arrow key so it'll download without me pushing the keys again and again.) I've been removing Tweeters who use a foreign language, those whose profiles say "We don't own any of the content posted," and those with Trump in their name or profile picture.

Last night I was reckless enough to do a "neverbernie" search of tweets and reply to some of them. (Clintonites on Twitter are insane--a couple even called Sanders a "grifter"!) A few Tweeters have blocked me, and I'll just have to assume that they have no answer for my brilliant comments.

SHANGHAI EXPRESS

"I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.  I was getting the bug myself.  I even began to try to see if doors were locked"--On the Road

"Why are you going to Shanghai?" "To buy a new hat"--Shanghai Express

"The government would have had my head long ago if it weren't such a good head"--ibid.

Monday night I saw Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich (for the second time). It's pretty stylish.  I didn't finish my popcorn.  Lillian and Anne and me had a nice chat afterward.

We have a new conductor at the opera.  Last night she said we're already sounding professional!

Today I finally started harvesting the garden.  I got in the carrots and started with the potatoes.

We finished the first season of Damages and will be starting the second one soon. (The rather annoying theme music has been going through my head.) What a double-crosser Patty is!

Simplify, simplify!

"Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars"--On the Road

Hayley Mills (smoking on a train): "I'm not a child, lady, I'm a midget with a bad habit"--The Trouble With Angels.

These days I'm trying to have a shakeout of things like Meetups I never go to and activists who send me emails but I can't sign their petitions because I don't have a U.S. zipcode.  And I've stopped playing the online game Island Experiment.  And just the other day I reached the maximum number of Tweeters you can follow (5000), so now I'm going through the list and removing the ones I know I'm not interested in.

Yesterday afternoon I saw Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels (for the third time, but the first time since I was a kid), with Dawna and Debi.  That's the one with Hayley Mills as a mischievous girl in a Catholic school run by nuns. (She reminded me of Claire in Six Feet Under.) Of course, it gets soft in the last half hour and she ends up entering the order. For me it's something of a guilty pleasure. 

On the Road is a pretty fun read, if not so profound as yet.

The cool autumn weather has arrived.  It's time to dig up the potatoes.