ejp626

PM on the Ormandy.

I enjoyed Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is sort of a mystery novel and also a bit of alternative history fiction (along the same lines as PKD's The Man in the High Castle).

Working my way through Nabokov's The Gift. It seems a bit uncharacteristic of most of his novels, but that's a positive for me, as I generally don't care for them. But I am enjoying The Gift so far.

It doesn't look like it, sorry. And the National Gallery is in DC, so it is an East Coast only show. I suspect there will be a catalog attached to the show, but it definitely isn't the same as being there.

I actually did that on a visit to Vienna. Very nice. Anyway, I just saw the Turner exhibit at the AGO (in Toronto), but I'll need to go back. It was still far too crowded to really get to see the pieces. The crowds should die down in another month. As it happens, I probably have seen all or virtually all of these pieces, since they are almost entirely drawn from the Tate Britain's Turner Wing, but it is still nice to see them again. Just as a head's up, there will be a Stuart Davis exhibit at the Whitney this summer, and it goes to the National Gallery in the late fall/early winter. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/StuartDavis I've basically decided I will travel to see it (Davis is in my top 10 and I don't think I've ever seen an exhibit solely decided to him), so I just need to work out some details a bit closer to the time.

Thanks! I'm going to have to be honest that I was at a performance of King Lear on Sun. and I didn't even check the score until I got home. But I hear it was quite a game!

Glad to hear you enjoyed it. I have been meaning to read this for the longest time, but at my current pace, it will probably be late 2016. This December I am going to tackle Middlemarch for the first time. Before I get there, however, I need to get through Molly Keane's Time After Time (which I am enjoying so far) and Nabokov's The Gift.

I really do not like this novel, which serves up a mushy magic realist setting to basically recount story after story of women who were mistreated by men (their fathers, husbands, pimps or johns) with one woman also abused by her alcoholic mother, just to provide a bit of variety. It's pure Oprah-bait, and I think at this point I will just skim the rest to get to that one "uplifting" story that is supposed to help redeem the book (sort of like the Precious movie).

How exciting! Thanks for running the contest each year!

I got a bit distracted by other matters, but I recently finished Narayan's Mr. Sampath. It was one of those books that I went back and forth on whether I had read it before, but eventually decided I had read it before. I don't reread a lot of books, but I will be going back to Mahfouz's Midaq Alley soon, as well as Kafka's The Trial. Currently starting into Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe. The beginning section about the Negro leagues is very boring. I hear that it goes wide and incorporates a whole bunch of characters, most of them with terrible, tragic lives. I wouldn't say I am really looking forward to this, but it's a fairly short novel.

Hmmm. Definitely too bad. I didn't realize that I did have so much of the contents in U.S. releases, though I suspected I had the Lester Young. It's a shame, since the package is pretty nice with cool covers and all. Anyway, I guess it is time that this site helped me save money for once...

This does look like it is focusing on earlier Vogue material, but I don't think I have all that much of it, aside from the Getz, Mulligan, Baker and the Lester Young. I had no idea that Brubeck or Ellington/Strayhorn had cut Vogue albums. For me, this is actually an easier choice than the original box, which I eventually broke down and bought. Anyway, from a different site (http://www.francemusique.fr/agenda/sortie-cd-jazz-america-disques-vogue-40-chefs-d-oeuvre-du-jazz-en-20-edition-limitee ), here are the album names: LE PROGRAMME : 1.Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn / New Stars - New Sounds Vol. 2 (+ Serge Chaloff) 2.Stan Getz Quartet / The Stan Getz Quintette - Jazz At Storyville 3.Art Tatum From Gene Norman's Just Jazz / Gene Norman's Just Jazz Vol. 3 / Frank Bull And Gene Norman's Blues Jubilee 4.Charlie Christian At Minton's / Charlie Christian - Dizzy Gillespie At Minton's 5.Dixieland Jubilee Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 (Lu Watters - Kid Ory / Albert Nicholas) 6.Charlie Parker Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 7.Originators Of Modern Jazz / A Date With… Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 (Dizzy Gillespie - Charlie Parker - Fats Navarro - Red Norvo - Hank Jones - Howard McGhee - James Moody - Buck Clayton - Hot Lips Page) 8.Erroll Garner Trio Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 9.Kings of Boogie Woogie (Albert Ammons - Meade Lux Lewis - Blind John Davis) 10.Mahalia Jackson Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 11.The Spirit Of Memphis Quartet (+ John Lee Hooker) 12.Wynonie Mr Blues Harris / Earl Bostic His Alto Sax And His Orchestra 13.Jelly Roll Morton - Piano Solos 14.Dave Brubeck Quartet Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 15.Miles Davis - Young Man With a Horn Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 16.Red Norvo - Men at Work Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 / George Shearing Quintet 17.Gerry Mulligan Quartet Vol. 2 / Vol. 3 / Vol. 4 18.Chet Baker Quartet Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 19.Sidney Bechet And His Blue Note Jazzmen Vol. 3 / Vol. 4 20.Lester Young Les Chefs-d'œuvre de Lester Young Vol. 1 / Vol. 2

Edmonton - 45

I have sold books, including academic books, on Amazon.com, but they move very slowly, like 2 or 3 sold per year. I can't sell books on Amazon.ca since the postal reimbursement is so low it isn't worth it. You probably are best off donating them to a university department where the grad students will scoop them up. Alternatively you could list a whole book lot on Kijiji or craigslist. You might get something faster that way.

I just saw Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, which I had never seen before. I rank it slightly below Earnest, but only slightly. I was quite surprised at how many famous lines are from that play. I'll probably see King Lear next Sunday. On a slightly related note, I entered the Toronto Fringe lottery and will find out tomorrow if I am one of the lucky winners, which will be exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Not me, but I heard of an English professor (at U Toronto?) who was saving Jane Austen's Emma -- for his deathbed perhaps. I generally don't think in those terms, though I certainly do have a moderate pile of CDs and a huge pile of DVDs I haven't gotten around to yet...

Just back from Ottawa. We saw a small, focused exhibit featuring 12 paintings by Monet, each including a bridge. There is also a small exhibit by Mary Pratt that is worth seeing if you are in the area.

Back from a weekend trip to Ottawa with a side trip to Kingston. Managed to finish Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington. In a way it was interesting, since I thought the narrator kept acting unreasonably. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to agree with her point of view or not, and I thought the ending was pretty lame. In general, I thought this was sort of an interesting anecdote, but would have worked better as a short story than a novel, even a short one. I also read Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People. It is hard to describe the book too much without giving too much away, but it is essentially a father trying to understand the shocking act his son committed. It is fairly philosophical. I actually thought it had strong similarities to Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (which I personally think is somewhat over-rated). That's really about all I have to say about it for the moment. I should be able to return to Narayan's Mr. Sampath and finish that up shortly.

I think in a different thread someone pointed out that a Joe Lovano CD just came out on Impulse. And I picked up the Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba release Tokyo Adagio, which is definitely on Impulse. It is soothing, though for that sort of thing I preferred Night and the City. It looks like there may be about 13 newish releases on Impulse: http://www.impulse-label.com/catalogue/

I'm enjoying The Cat's Table. It is the story of 3 boys from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) taking an ocean liner to England to rejoin their families or to be foisted off on other relations. They get into a number of odd situations (Narayan's Swami and Friends is an obvious reference) but they also begin learning about the adult world during this topsy-turvy voyage. It actually makes me want to reread Katherine Ann Porter's Ship of Fools, but I think I'll leave that where it is on the TBR pile. Somewhat coincidentally the next book I plan to read is Narayan's Mr Sampath.

I'm hoping to get to the Albright-Knox in Dec., but even more of a stretch goal is the Cleveland Art Museum, which has an interesting exhibit on how Monet and other impressionists and post-impressionists treated the garden as a subject. I also saw the Motley exhibit in Chicago -- I liked it quite a bit. I haven't seen this, though I feel that I have (and I will next year): Lawren Harris has an exhibit at the Hammer Museum in LA, which then moves to Boston and then finally Toronto. I like Harris quite a bit, though I think they are looking at just a single aspect of his career, so it is not too surprising that some reviews are a bit dismissive. I've blogged a bit about it here: http://erics-hangout.blogspot.ca/2015/10/lawren-harris.html Finally, a solid exhibition on J.M.W. Turner just opened up in Toronto at the AGO. I think it will be too crowded this weekend, but I will try to go soon afterwards.

Definitely interesting, but I would recommend pulling down your W-2 and posting it with the SSN obscured.

Definitely a great trilogy. I don't know when I'll have time to reread them, but I will try some day. I actually saw Robertson Davies on a reading tour at the 92nd Y in New York City. I'm pretty sure he was reading from The Cunning Man. Currently reading the sequel to Three Men in a Boat, Three Men on the Bummel, which is quite good. A few of the jokes are even better than the ones in the original, and I swear the Monty Python folks nicked one of the gags. On deck after this is Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table.

She was definitely portrayed as a reviewer from an earlier generation, but I have no problem believing this happens now. I read the theatre reviews in the Guardian frequently and there is no question that when it is a "big name" starring on a West End show, at least part of the review is about the star system in general and whether this star in particular transcends all the fuss to deliver a decent performance. (In particular all the fuss around Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet, in what from several accounts seems to be a pretty poorly thought through production. At one point the play actually opened with the To Be or Not to Be monologue.) Every so often there will be an article bemoaning the star system in general. You never really know what is going on with a critic and the bees in his or her bonnet. I used to read Chris Jones, the Tribune critic regularly, (til his columns went behind a paywall) and if it was a Broadway transfer (or a play on the scale of a Broadway transfer), a chunk of his review always went to discussing if it was a union production or not. Bottom line is that was not the most outlandish part of that film by any means... As far as Beehive goes, I do expect to get the set relatively soon, though I am still working on clearing off some shelf space...

I'm just starting Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? Her first two collections have a complicated, but largely positive view of growing up in rural Ontario. That's oversimplifying, but I was shocked when I came to "Privilege" where she is describing the situation in the rural school Rose attends. Munro makes this sound like some Hobbesian nightmare where the teacher turns a blind eye to all the terrors that the older kids inflict on the younger kids - and the younger kids inflict on each other. It's practically Lord of the Flies set in Hanratty, Ontario (she was actually writing about Wingham, Ont.). The relationship between Rose and her step-mother Flo isn't much better. It looks like the whole collection will be pretty dark.