FINNEGANS WAKE

 "The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy"--Finnegans Wake

I've joined a new Meetup group that's reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake a couple of pages at a time.  The language is really complicated! (Notice that the title has no apostrophe...) Fortunately I've found the webpage finwake.com with an annotated text.  We meet online on Sunday nights.

I've also taken over an online Meetup group for reading short stories. (I enjoyed Farshad's similar Meetup, but he returned to Iran and that group disappeared.) Yesterday I had an event where we discussed Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly" and "Bardon Bus" and next month we'll do Stephen Leacock's hilarious parody collection Nonsense Novels.

I've caught up with the manga version of One Piece, having seen episode 1079! (They're now on a scientific research island called Egghead.)

On my Friday night watch party I've been showing some movies that even I haven't seen!  In recent weeks there's been the Japanese samurai-era movie Gate of Hell and Barry Levinson's Baltimore-set Liberty Heights, and last week it was the newsboy musical Newsies. (This week I'm showing The Thin Red Line, which I did see 25 years ago...)

The Labour Party's National Executive Committee finally went and deselected ex-leader Jeremy Corbyn!  Very tacky, and I've been vocal about it on Twitter.  It's time for the British left to form a new party. (I think of the Reservoir Dogs line "Are you gonna bark all day, Little Doggie, or are you gonna bite?" It's time for the left to bite.)

Caught up with ONE PIECE

Last week, after four or five years, I finally got caught up with the long-running anime One Piece, seeing the last of its 1053 existing episodes! (Now I'll have to watch just one a week, like others who are up to date, instead of two a day.) Now I'm reading the manga version of the story online, which is about 50 episodes ahead of the anime.  I've almost reached the end of the Wano story, the longest and most colourful of its mega-arcs.  It involves a country that's avoided foreign contact for centuries, and it takes its look from Japan's similar Edo Era.

Speaking of which, I'm now reading Mark Ravina's To Stand With the Nations of the World:  Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History for my History Meetup.  I moved the location back to the Tim Horton Doughnuts near Bay station because the Imperial Pub was too crowded for people to find me.  But now I think I'll move it to the doughnut place on St. Clair West because parking will be easier there.

I like this weather when there's still snow on the ground but it's melting!

On Thursday Moira and I had lunch at Puitak's apartment and we skimmed through the Oscars show.  We walked down to her place, because the weather was warm, and I felt pretty bushed afterward.

On Friday night my watch party showed Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about the Irish Troubles.  I'd seen it before over 15 years ago, but I'd forgotten how good it was! (The next day I watched it again with the DVD commentary, by Loach and an Irish historian.) It's a real disgrace that he was expelled from the Labour Party for promoting Labour Against the Witch Hunt...

Today I had a big headache and skipped dinner.

DON GIOVANNI

On his role in the Barcelona standoff between anarchists and the Republican government: "If this was history it did not feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one just had to stay at one’s post, bored, dropping with sleep and completely uninterested as to what it was all about"--Homage to Catalonia

We put on Don Giovanni the weekend before last at the Miles Nadal theatre near Spadina station. It was pretty fun.  I missed the Saturday afternoon performance because I thought it was in the evening! (I told people afterward that I hadn't been feeling well.)

I finished reading that book about the Spanish Civil War and also read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.  Now I'm reading Periodic Tales:  The Curious Lives of the Elements, a book by Hugh Aldersey-Williams about the history of man's relationship with various chemical elements.  I got it in London over ten years ago and only got around to reading it now.

Last Tuesday John P. and I saw Neil Jordan's Marlowe with Liam Neeson as Raymond Chandler's detective.  That was pretty fun too.

Saturday I saw the Chinese movie Hidden Blade just because I needed to get out of the house!  It's a pretty confusing story about Chinese spies working for the Japanese occupiers during World War II and turning double agent--the sort of thing where two of the earliest scenes turn out to be flash-forwards to scenes at the end.

I ran out of Cipralex and only got replenished today, so I had some more vivid dreams.  In one I was a graduate student in London (like I really was in the mid-'90s), but then the story changed and I became like Peter Sellers in Being There, becoming a "star" for no good reason.  In another I was visiting a theme park near Niagara Falls with a World War II theme with an actor performing a Joseph Goebbels speech! (I was reading about Goebbels on Wikipedia...)