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I changed my mind. It is just one damn thing after another. Trouble follows this family from Africa to America and back to Africa. Just too damn much for this reader to take. Life really is too short to spent it reading books that you don't enjoy at least a little. I should say that while there were certainly plenty of feel-bad events in Lawrence Hill's A Book of Negroes, it was better written and more compelling.

I finished Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City (NYRB). The title story/novella was ok and I really liked the short story "Sealed Off." The remaining novellas were fairly forgettable. I'm midway through Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go. It was certainly blown up in certain quarters, but in my opinion, it doesn't live up to the hype. I'll probably finish it, though a bit grudgingly.

I was just in Chicago and stopped by the MCA to check out the Kerry James Marshall exhibit: https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2016/Kerry-James-Marshall It runs through Sept. 25, so about one more month to catch it. I've seen a fair number of Marshall's paintings in different museums, but seeing them all in one place was particularly impressive and gave me a bit more appreciation for his work. The exhibition travels to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017, so something to consider for you folks on the coasts. I'm debating coming back to Chicago in late Oct.-early Nov. to see the Norman Lewis exhibit, but I haven't really made up my mind yet.

Has anyone picked this up yet? I saw it in Dusty Groove, but decided to hold off for another month or two. It does look appealing, though I will admit that giving the last track over to a drum solo (not just a track featuring a drum solo but a piece that is nothing but a drum solo) seems a bit perverse and is one of the reasons I didn't pull the trigger as of yet. I'm sure I will get this eventually, however.

This is the one that most explicitly references jazz themes: Mural for Studio B, WNYC, Municipal Broadcasting Company, 1939. Here are a couple that strike me as jazz-influenced: The Mellow Pad, 1951 (For some reason, a recent printing of Gaddis's The Recognitions uses part of this as the cover, so I made sure to buy that edition.) The Paris Bit, 1959 All three of these are in the show along with nearly 100 other paintings.

I saw the Stuart Davis exhibit at the Whitney. I thought it was very good. It had all the main phases of his career covered. I particularly liked the way they emphasized the serial nature of his work, reformating and reworking paintings into new works. They had a wall with 4 paintings, all clearly related, covering a span of 30+ years. Maybe not quite as impressive as Monet painting his Japanese bridge over and over again, but sort of the same principle. Definitely worth checking out if in NYC. It goes to DC this winter. I think those are the only two stops. As an added bonus, they had the Archibald Motley Jazz Age Modernist catalog in stock in the gift shop and it rang up as a $20 off sale. Score! These have been OOP for a while, but Duke must have finally reprinted some, as they are back on Amazon.

I particularly like a couple of the more offbeat Greene novels: Travels with My Aunt and Monsignor Quixote. I recently picked up an enhanced version of The Quiet American, with some critical essays and such, but I don't know where I put it... Anyway, I just read Quarrington's Whale Music, which is ostensibly about an early rock 'n' roll group, The Howl Brothers, but is really about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. It didn't quite live up to its opening chapter but it had its moments. I'm about to launch into Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes.

RIP As already said, not unexpected but still a blow on what happens to be a fairly gloomy day. Some of my favorite BN albums feature Bobby. I'll make sure to spin Dialogue today. I didn't get that many chances to see Bobby Hutcherson play (or Andrew Hill for that matter), but I managed to see both of them two or perhaps three times. I saw the Bobby Hutcherson Sextet play Iridium in 2003, and I saw him as part of the SF Jazz Collective in 2005. I think I saw him one other time, but I can't recall the details at the moment. I am sorry I didn't make the effort to come to the Chicago Jazz Festival last summer, as he was one of the headliners.

I saw The Tragically Hip in what is almost certainly their last show in Toronto. They are playing a show in Hamilton and then their last show will be in Kingston on the 20th. Barring a miracle, that will be it. (The lead singer has an aggressive and apparently incurable brain cancer.) Needless to say, it was an emotional night.

I just saw Werner Herzog's new documentary about the internet. It's called Lo and Behold. It's pretty good, especially as it mostly focuses on the longer implications of humanity becoming so reliant on the internet. The middle section about the dark side of the internet is woefully limited, in the sense that he picks a single, terrible example of trolling of a dead girl's family. I'm not looking for "balance," but some other examples of message boards overrun by trolls or newspapers giving up on allowing comments would have been illuminating, as well as at least one talking head explaining just what it is about the internet that makes it such a magnet for unbalanced people with too much time on their hands. Anyway, I thought it was worth seeing.

I am not liking Roth's Sabbath's Theater at all. It's almost as if Roth got so fed up at being called a sexist writer that he decided to write one of the most misogynistic and frankly unpleasant characters he could come up with. There are a few moments that are sort of ripped off from Boudu Saved From Drowning but with less elan. I think Roth (or rather his character) has crossed an unforgivable line when Mickey Sabbath is staying at a friend's house, and he goes through the teenage daughter's dresser and starts sniffing her panties etc. etc. etc. Really?!? I'm going to take a bit of a break and come back to this in a week, but I think I'm done with this book.

Bowen in particular more than Taylor, seems to be starting off in Austen territory. We often find out how much each of the characters makes per year. On top of all the other reasons he is unsuitable, Eddie has less guaranteed income than Portia will, once she comes of age. However, Portia is certainly not rich enough to support an idle husband, so the match really is impossible for all kinds of reasons. I can't really remember the age gap in the majority of Austen relationships. Certainly many of the movies play it down. In Bowen, she seems to be writing in an era when, at least for quite a few of her middle class strivers, they were heading into marriages of the Italian type (much older men finally being able to marry young wives). This was a theme that came up in Bowen's The Hotel. Literature wouldn't be too interesting if it was just about people making good or appropriate choices, but you still need to want to spend time with the characters. Up to this point, Taylor succeeds for me in a way that Bowen generally doesn't.

I have gotten just under halfway through. I have to say it reminds me a lot of Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, which I enjoyed a bit more. They are both well-written stories about juvenile love (or at least a love story that started in youth) but they focus on characters that bore me terribly. I wouldn't want to spend more than half an hour in Portia's company, as she seems like such a dullard. In the U.S. context, we have nothing but contempt for college age boys (and Eddie's just a bit past that) that hang around high schools, trying to date the sophomores and juniors. I just can't shake that revulsion... Anyway, I have just put this on my library hold list and should have it by September: Tim Murphy's Christodora The write-up seems pretty intriguing. http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=Christodora I don't know quite how I feel it being optioned for TV already before it has even hit the bookstores and found an audience. Well, the TV series may or may not become a reality.

I finished Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, which turned out to be super depressing. It is almost a complete inversion of Gilead -- bitter, small town residents and an embittered minister's wife and the minister who doesn't believe in what he preaches. It's still good, solid writing, but I felt soiled at the end. I ripped through Jonathan Lethem's Men and Cartoons, which was slight and disappointing. I'm now into a much more substantial book: Sabbath's Theatre and I'm also reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. (I'll definitely need to read something more cheerful soon!)

A couple of weeks ago I went to the AGO and saw the Lawren Harris exhibit. I had seen it in Boston, but they added a couple of rooms of Harris's earlier work, so it was an expanded exhibit. Last weekend we were going to go again, both to see Harris and the Theaster Gates exhibit which just opened, but my wife was suffering from intense allergies. We'll probably go in Sept. Anyway, at the end of August, I'll be in New York. There are a bunch of exhibits I plan on seeing, but really the main attraction is the Stuart Davis exhibit at the Whitney. I have to schedule enough time for that no matter what else I see.

Just about to wrap up Willa Cather's My Antonia. I'm enjoying it a fair bit. Some good insights in there about the transition from rural to urban lifestyle, as well as how immigrants fit into (or didn't) the vastness of the prairies. I'm a bit sorry I didn't encounter this sooner (I probably should have read in high school but I skipped over American literature). I've just started Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House. My initial reaction is very positive -- I think this is one of those underrated classics. The tone (and topics covered) in the few pages I've read put me in mind of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which is a surprisingly good novel. If you are a fan of Gilead (or the others in that series), you probably would also like As For Me and My House. (Actually, I may have to qualify this, in that I may have pre-judged the resolution of the novel, which may be considerably more depressing, while Gilead is more uplifting. The writing is still sharp though.) After this, for a complete change of pace, Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater.

Most cycle shops still have free air. I know that 5 or 6 years ago, I had to pay for air in Chicago, though I think it was just a quarter. It's not really a new thing.

I've finished Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. I've collected my thoughts on it here if interested: http://erics-hangout.blogspot.ca/2016/07/darwins-voyage-at-end.html I'm nearly done with Han Kang's The Vegetarian. It's kind of interesting, but I have to say I think it won the Booker International more for its shock value than any lasting literary legacy. Definitely one to borrow or rent rather than buy... Next up are Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower and Willa Cather's My Antonia. (A bit of strange pairing to be sure.) After that, for something completely different - Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.

Dwayne Wade coming to the Bulls. Obviously I may be wrong, but this doesn't look like a sensible move on the Bulls' part. It reeks of desperation.

Well, perhaps, though there are a large number of people who think that citified raccoons are a breed apart from their country cousins, and city raccoons do not appear to be much bothered by coyotes.

Maybe I should title this - Raccoon problems? Advice??? The raccoons in the Riverdale neighborhood have definitely gotten out of hand. I have seen them up on the upper deck, and in fact trying to figure out the screen door. They seem to have no fear of humans, and will just look at me for a bit and saunter away. What kills me is that we are more careful than anyone else on the block about the food scrap bin. (We actually store everything in a downstairs fridge and take it out 30 minutes before the garbage men come in the morning. It's a total pain and means scrambling in the morning. On the positive side, we have had almost no bins knocked over.) However, it appears that the raccoons have made a nest under my lower deck and use that as a launching pad for forays into other yards for food. I'm totally sick of it. Raccoons are so out of hand in Toronto that City pest control won't respond at all, usually not even to reports of a rabid raccoons! You are on your own to pay for private pest control, but apparently the humane laws here say you can't remove a raccoon more than 1 km from where it was picked up. That makes no sense to me, since you can't just drop it in someone else's yard. We do have some train tracks nearby though... If I could get away with it, I would definitely poison them, since the ones in my yard are huge and have lost whatever fear of humans they had or should have. I actually don't feel safe, and I thought they were going to come up after me, as I was out painting the upper deck this evening. What I will do is tear down the lower deck and cover the backyard with paving stones. Most likely they will move on after that. I still might need more pest control in the meantime, so any advice is welcome.

I didn't really care for the ending of Blackass. Also, the morals of the main character just get worse and worse as the novel progresses, sort of like The White Tiger, though in that case you knew from the beginning that the narrator was amoral. I got just a few pages into In Between Dreams and found out it crossed one of my thick red lines (that cause me to abandon novels). There are some things I simply am not willing to read. I guess I'm glad I found out right away without wasting any more time. Of course, now I have no idea whether I will read her second novel, though I am certainly leaning against it. Anyway, Darwin has finally reached the Galapagos, so I'll just try to wrap that up.

I don't know his middle name, but A.X. Cohen or something along those lines. One of the Simpsons/Futurama writers has to go by David X. Cohen, because there already was a David S. Cohen in the Writers' Guild! David S. would have used his actual name.

No, one of them has to do something to distinguish himself (or herself) from the other. This is one area where I strongly agree with SAG -- you can't have two performers using the same name.

Nearly done with Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett. It's in the good but not great category. I should wrap it up this weekend. I'm then going to launch into In Between Dreams by Iman Verjee. (She has her 2nd novel dropping in August, though it may already be available in the States. The Kindle version is already out. I want to see what I think of her first novel.) Then the library is sending me Han Kang's The Vegetarian, which won the Booker International Prize. Still slowly making my way through The Voyage of the Beagle. I'm just about at the chapter covering the Galapagos Islands (finally!).