Sunday, September 29, 2019

Climate March

"I do not know how long I lay there on the ground, but then I woke, and was not hungry, and there were goatherds with me who undoubtedly were the ones who helped me in my need, because they told me how they had found me, and how I was saying so many foolish things and raving so much that I clearly had lost my reason; from that time on I have felt that I am not always in my right mind, and my reason is so damaged and weak that I do a thousand mad acts, tearing my clothes, shouting in these desolate places, cursing my fate, and repeating in vain the beloved name of my enemy, having no other purpose or intention than to shout my life to an end; when I come back to myself, I am so tired and bruised I can barely move"--Don Quixote

"Please let my poor life choices cause my death, not climate change"--my favorite placard

Yesterday I went on the Climate March.  Lots of placards saying things like "Respect your mother," with an image of the earth, "What we stand for is what we stand on," and "Eat the rich." (One said, "You'll never be a billionaire, but that doesn't mean you can't find out how they taste!") In the last march I started near the end and advanced to the front; this time I started near the front and let people pass me.

After I got home, John was digging up the basement's cement floor near our main water pipe, so Moira and I were carrying bucketloads of cement and dirt to the back yard.  He may end up redoing the whole floor!

Thursday I set up some Mukherjee signs on Wychcrest Avenue.  Later, at opera rehearsal, we started staging the first act from Tales of Hoffmann with the drinking students.

Today I went to an Astrology Meetup. (I wish I knew the exact time of my birth to determine my ascendant, but I'm really not motivated enough to seek out the records and find out!) Then I went on Betty-Anne's Queen Street West art walk.  I was somewhat late because the Queen streetcar went into a King Street detour between Yonge and Spadina!

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Campaign office

"It was rare foresight on the part of the wise man who favours me to make what is really and truly the helmet of Mambrino seem a basin to everyone else, because it is held in such high esteem that everyone would pursue me in order to take it from me; but since they see it as only a barber's basin, they do not attempt to obtain it, as was evident when that man tried to shatter it, then left it on the ground, not taking it away with him; by my faith, if he had recognized it for what it was he never would have left it behind"--Don Quixote

I've started doing volunteer work on the St. Paul's NDP campaign, as I've been doing for twenty years.  Their federal candidate is Alok Mukherjee, and the official kickoff was on Saturday. (It helps that the campaign office is only a few blocks from my house!)

Lots of different stuff to do in a campaign.  Sunday I divide thousands of leaflets into bundles of 200, which didn't take so long:  first I counted out 25, then made a second pile of the same height and combined them into 50, and did the same thing again to get 100, and again to get 200. Eventually I kept one pile of 200 and made new piles of the same height!

Yesterday I went out dropping leaflets with Mrs. Mukherjee in a single block next to Melita Crescent.  And today I went out putting up NDP signs.  We were driving around the neighbourhood for three hours, and when I got home dinner was cold! (I could have microwaved it, but I didn't feel motivated enough.)

I finished bringing in the potatoes the other day.  Now John can add a new layer of topsoil to that frame as he planned.

I finally got around to sending in the Civic Centre Public Space Account Application for my Play Readthrough Meetup.

My new shoes feel great!

Thursday, September 19, 2019

THE LAST VALLEY

"Speak quickly.  I ran out of patience twelve years ago!"--The Last Valley

I took over the Play Read-Through Meetup and I'm trying to find a location for it.  I hoped to book a room at a library branch but that process has proved too bureaucratic for me. I'm going to try for a room at Metro Hall instead.

Monday night I went to a Meetup for over-50 dating.  We met at Chi, the same place where I went to an Organizers Meetup the other year.  Thirty people came, and it was a bit intimidating.

Last night the History Meetup screened James Clavell's The Last Valley, about a group of mercenaries in the Thirty Years War who find a village in a valley that's avoided the general devastation and arrange an uneasy coexistence.  Surprisingly intelligent.  A dozen people said they were coming but just five showed up.

Today I went to Walmart and finally bought new shoes. (I also got a shirt and pants.) Now I'll use my old shoes in the garden and finish gathering in the potatoes so John can put some more soil in the frame.

I finished translating the story "Early Morning Rabbits" into Korean!

Sunday, September 15, 2019

Fall cleaning

"The thought left me disconcerted and wanting to know, really and truly and in its entirety, the life and miracles of our famous Spaniard Don Quixote of La Mancha, the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and in these calamitous times to take up the exercise and profession of chivalric arms, righting wrongs, defending widows, and protecting those maidens who rode, with whips and palfreys, and bearing all their virginity on their backs, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley; and unless some villain, or some farmer with hatchet and pitchfork, or some enormous giant forced her, a maiden could, in days of yore, after eighty years of never once sleeping under a roof, go to her grave as pure as the day her mother bore her"--Don Quixote

This week we've been doing fall cleaning.  Think of it as spring cleaning six months late. (Or as I prefer, six months early!) We shifted a lot of junk at the outermost end of the back yard, and I'd forgotten how long it is! It reminded me of my Aunt Alma's back yard in a suburb of Sydney in Cape Breton, which went all the way down to the shore!

My room also got Marie Kondoized.  My computer now has a big table in place of its former old-fashioned desk.  The armchair I used to sit in when using it is now out on the sidewalk in case someone wants it.  We'd got it when we lived in New Brunswick almost forty years ago!  That's the same age as my clock radio, which no longer works as a radio, but I'd still been using its digital clock feature, but now I feel it's time for a change.

When I sat down at my computer on its new table, I had a drink in a glass that came apart in my hands! (It had had a crack at the bottom but I didn't care because it wasn't leaking, even earlier that day when I noticed the crack getting longer.) Hello again, mess.

Thursday night was this season's first opera rehearsal.  This year the Toronto City Opera is doing Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (one of my favourites!) this fall, and I think we'll be doing Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (another favourite) in the spring.  We started learning Offenbach's Drinking Chorus, just the notes without the French words.

Today we had the first Crowdreads Meetup since Sergei's return from Odessa. We discussed art, and I brought several coffee-table books of ours showing masterpieces from famous museums (National Gallery, Louvre, Prado...). I also printed out Picasso's "Guernica" and Joseph Wright's "Experiment With a Bird in an Air Pump." It occurred to me to say that "Guernica" depicts chaos yet isn't itself chaotic, which John P. thought sophisticated.

Unfortunately, I was way late because the Harbourfront streetcar was off, and the walking route was also blocked, so I had to go to the York Street end of Union Station and go south and east. (I was also late getting home, of course.) The Harbourfront bike path now has its own traffic signals!

Yesterday we were airing out the house because of smoke detector problems, so I had to open my windows, and it was so cool that I put on a sweater (the first of the season). Yet when I went out today I wish I'd taken my summer jacket, it was that warm!

This is a longer post than usual...

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

DON QUIXOTE

"He spent four days thinking about the name he would give it; for--as he told himself--it was not seemly that the horse of so famous a knight, and a steed so intrinsically excellent, should not have a worthy name; he was looking for the precise name that would declare what the horse had been before its master became a knight errant and what it was now; for he was determined that if the master was changing his condition, the horse too would change its name to one that would win the fame and recognition its new position and profession deserved; and so, after many names that he shaped and discarded, subtracted from and added to, unmade and remade in his memory and imagination, he finally decided to call the horse Rocinante, a name, in his opinion, that was noble, sonorous, and reflective of what it had been when it was a nag, before it was what it was now, which was the foremost nag in all the world"--Don Quixote

I've started reading Cervantes' Don Quixote for my Book Club. (I'm just getting to the chapter about the book-burning, clearly a commentary on the Inquisition.) They say Edith Grossman's new translation is great, and what I've read so far is pretty good.

Over a dozen people came to the History Meetup Wednesday, but the Book Club Meetup Sunday was only Debi and me.  Oh well, I greatly enjoyed The Way of All Flesh.

Friday I had lunch with Sergei and Maria at the new Thai restaurant around the corner from my house.  The last time we'd met I'd promised to take care of Maria's orchid while the two of them were visiting Odessa, but I'd lost it on the way home! (I had a big headache and wasn't thinking straight.) I was worried about how Maria would take it, but she was surprisingly understanding!  They gave me a cup from Odessa showing Ukrainian place names in the Cyrillic alphabet, and they were surprised that I could read most of it.

I did get Maria a new orchid. Tuesday I went to a place on Roncesvalles Avenue, but they only had them in white instead of purple like the original.  On Wednesday I went to a place near King and Parliament, but they didn't have any orchids.  So Thursday I went back to the first place and got a white one after all.

Dinner today was fettucine alfredo, but we tried a different recipe using brie cheese and bacon pieces.  I think I like smelling bacon more than eating it!

Thursday, September 05, 2019

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH quotes

Just like I did with Main Street, I feel like doing a whole post of The Way of All Flesh quotes.

"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible.  A more unreliable book was never put upon paper.  Take my advice and don't read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."
"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as that Christ died and rose from the dead?  Surely you believe this?" said Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the kind.
"I do not believe it, I know it."
"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"
"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be infallible and to be informed of Christ himself."

"Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.  It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal.  Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do."

"He had fallen, as I have shown, among a gang of spiritual thieves or coiners, who passed the basest metal upon him without his finding it out, so childish and inexperienced was he in the ways of anything but those back eddies of the world, schools and universities.  Among the bad threepenny pieces which had been passed off upon him, and which he kept for small hourly disbursement, was a remark that poor people were much nicer than the richer and better behaved."

A letter from his father: "My dear Ernest, My object in writing is not to upbraid you with the disgrace and shame you have inflicted upon your mother and myself, to say nothing of your brother Joey, and your sister..."

"They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience' sake."

"Nevertheless, what he wanted was in reality so easily to be found that it took a highly educated scholar like himself to be unable to find it."

"If Universities were not the worst teachers in the world I should like to see professorships of speculation established at Oxford and Cambridge.  When I reflect, however, that the only things worth doing which Oxford and Cambridge can do well are cooking, cricket, rowing and games, of which there is no professorship, I fear that the establishment of a professorial chair would end in teaching young men neither how to speculate, nor how not to speculate, but would simply turn them out as bad speculators."

A doctor: "I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients.  I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals.  Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally, but let him go to their house twice a week for a fortnight, and stay with the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the elephants, till they begin to bore him.  I find these beasts do my patients more good than any others.  The monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they do not stimulate sufficiently.  The larger carnivora are unsympathetic.  The reptiles are worse than useless, and the marsupials are not much better.  Birds again, except parrots, are not very beneficial; he may look at them now and again, but with the elephants and the pig tribe generally he should mix just now as freely as possible."

"This was the course things had taken in the Church of England during the last forty years [the mid-19th century]. The set has been steadily in one direction.  A few men who knew what they wanted made cats' paws of the Christmas and the Charlottes, and the Christmas and the Charlottes made cats' paws of the Mrs. Goodhews, and the old Miss Wrights, and Mrs. Goodhews and old Miss Wrights told the Mr. Goodhews and young Miss Wrights what they should do, and when the Mr. Goodhews and the young Miss Wrights did it the little Goodhews and the rest of the spiritual flock did as they did, and the Theobalds went for nothing; step by step, day by day, year by year, parish by parish, diocese by diocese this was how it was done.  And yet the Church of England looks with no friendly eyes upon the theory of Evolution or Descent with Modification."

On a sister's letters: "I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words 'hope,' 'think,' 'feel,' 'try,' 'bright,' and 'little,' and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once.  All this has the effect of making her style monotonous."

Sunday, September 01, 2019

Davenport library

"He said: 'Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got five pounds for Paradise Lost.'

"'And a great deal too much,' I rejoined promptly. 'I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all"--The Way of All Flesh

Finished The Way of All Flesh.  If Main Street is a sharp satire, The Way of All Flesh is a savage one!

Next Wednesday my History Meetup is discussing the Holy Roman Empire.  I'd suggested Joachim Whaley's The Holy Roman Empire:  A Short Introduction for background reading.  But that book wasn't at any nearby library branches so I had to place a hold and hope it arrived in time for me to finish it before the Meetup.

I was afraid that the book wouldn't arrive in time, so I started reading Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger's The Holy Roman Empire:  A Short History, which unfortunately was mainly focusing on the formal institutions of the post-Renaissance centuries. (That book I did find at a nearby branch!) But the first book did arrive in time, so that didn't matter.  

They're still renovating the Wychwood branch, so I had to pick the book up Friday at the Davenport branch, which is actually closer to my house but a lot smaller. (That's a photo of it at the top.) One of the things I like about Toronto is those small library branches!  If a future Rob Ford decides to start closing library branches, places like Davenport will be the first to go and their neighbourhoods will be a lot worse off without them...

Friday afternoon I saw Fiddler:  Miracle of Miracles, a documentary about the Sholom Aleichem musical Fiddler on the Roof. (I saw it at the Bloor Hot Docs and renewed my membership--hadn't been there for months!) It reminded me of the time back in 1995 when I flew to London, England, to spend eight months researching my Ph.D. thesis.  The night before leaving I saw a video of the movie version and the finale had the line "Soon I'll be a stranger in a strange new place"!

Saturday I went to Margo's barbecue up in Vaughan.  This cooler weather is giving me headaches!

I've also been reading The Bluffer's Guide to Poetry.  It's a really funny book!