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It's been a whirlwind week at NYC and Boston museums. I made a trip to the Met, and enjoyed it very much, though this is one of the first times that the special exhibits didn't grab me, and I stayed almost entirely in the main galleries. I guess you could call the exhibit on Modernism in the 20th C Galleries a special exhibit. There is a room with a newly rediscovered mural by Thomas Hart Benton: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/thomas-hart-benton Unfortunately, most of my photos didn't turn out that well. Also, I did not see that Bulletin in the gift shop. I'll almost certainly be coming back to NY this summer (for the Stuart Davis show at the Whitney) and while the Benton mural will be gone, I should be able to grab the Bulletin. I'm going to be honest and say I was horribly disappointed with the Brooklyn Museum. The special exhibit on Coney Island was ok, but the entire American collection was off-view and 90% of the European paintings. What a complete waste of time. The MoMA was entertaining as always, and the special exhibit on Jackson Pollack was pretty good. I was a bit disappointed that the Max Beckmann triptych was off-view, though they did have Rosenquist's F-111 on-view, which is not displayed that often. Last night I was at the Boston MFA and enjoyed seeing the art there, along with the special exhibit on Lawren Harris. We'll probably see the Harvard Museums of Art today and end with the Isabella Gardner Museum tonight with its evening hours.

I find Roderick is a bit too hot-headed for my tastes. I tend to think he deserves much of what happens to him, though it is his companion Strap who keeps getting drenched in urine. It's a missed opportunity that Mayall and Edmondson never did a version of Smollett (here I am thinking of Steve Coogan tackling Sterne). Anyway, I'll probably skim Peregrine Pickle, though most reviewers say it falls off sharply after the first 50 pages, and then later in the year, I'll read Humphrey Clinker. That should be enough Smollett for me.

I'm mixing my reading list up just a bit, since we will be traveling, and I wanted a longer book. I'm going to tackle Smollet's Roderick Random. Then back to the Brian Moore book. Also, I need to fit in Emmanuel Bove's A Man Who Knows, since it is due at the end of the month and cannot be renewed (but it is quite short).

Isn't that basically Recollections of the Big Band Era/Will the Big Bands Ever Come Back? I believe there was a CD issue of this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000002JJV?qid=1457311507&ref_=tmm_acd_swatch_0&sr=8-8 (along with some PD versions, but this was legit, I think). There is also an Original Album Series of Reprise albums but it only includes Will the Big Bands Ever Come Back? http://www.amazon.com/Original-Album-Ellingtons-Ellington-2010-03-01/dp/B014I7DR8C/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1457311630&sr=8-4&keywords=duke+big+bands+come+back

I've been listening to Duke Ellington Reprise Studio Sessions, mostly Afro-Bossa.

I think at best they may have made a breakthrough for one kind of cancer, not all cancers. But any improved treatments are a good thing.

This is a wild book. It feels to me like Ishmael Reed refracted through Tristram Shandy. I mean that as a compliment. There is a philosophical component as the main character is supposed to be arriving at a kind of zen Buddhist enlightenment by the end, but I believe the path is the one with koan-like riddles. Kind of sorry I didn't discover this in college.

While the selection is quite odd and the search feature less than ideal, it is worth seeing if your public library has a subscription to Hoopla, which allows you to check out (and then stream) music or movies for a week. One significant downside is that you can only check out 6 or 7 titles per month (but as far as I can tell, each family member with a library card can have a different account!). Also, it is a completely free service, so I can accept some of its limitations. The main reason I am mentioning this is that they have the Ahmad Jamal Mosaic in their collection. Not sure about any other Mosaics, but I'll do a search later. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the titles on Tidal also show up here.

It looks promising, but I won't start it until next week. This one is a bit different from his other work as it mostly takes place in Canada.

Maybe I missed this in the discussion, but I just discovered that the Mosaic set has 4 of the 8 tracks of the Ray Brown/Milt Jackson album. For instance, Dew And Mud is not on there. This song is certainly is scored for quite a few horns, though maybe it falls short of a big band. (Or possibly the horns were overdubbed and thus don't count?) I can't really tell, since I don't have the liner to Ray Brown/Milt Jackson. For Someone I Love is also missing, and that sounds like it has a large trombone section. Any ideas? This is a case where I really think they ought to have included the whole album, particularly as it isn't one of those cases where half the tracks are big band and half quartet or quintet. This is a case where at least two of the missing tracks sound like a big band (to me) and thematically would have fit with the box concept -- and it would not be so annoying to have track down the rest of the album.

I'm enjoying this, though I am spending a lot of time thinking back to the film versions. (This probably confirms my general feeling that if you plan to watch the film and read the book, it is better to read the book first. Not always possible of course.) The physics, such as they are, seem completely absurd to me. I don't care how intelligent this Solaris thing is, it can't completely overcome gravity and change the planet's orbit. It simply wouldn't have the mass to do it. (A minor point overall.) After this Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

I just finished Mukherjee's Miss New India, which is probably best described as Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick in Bangalore with the additional twist that the main character is female. The secondary characters are all more interesting that the main character. (One could easily say the same thing for most of Dickens' novels that star a juvenile lead.) I'm partway through Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass. It's short, so I'll probably be done with it tomorrow. It's basically a bar patron writing down the stories of a seedy bar in the Congo. It's not bad. There is a scene early on that seemed inspired by Monty Python's Splunge sketch. After this Lem's Solaris. I'm quite interested to see what I make of this. I've seen the two film versions but know that the book is a bit different.

Not saying it won't happen. Almost anything can happen, but what is particularly interesting and perhaps worrying is that this is happening in two cities that don't have booming job market (like Calgary). So they presumably won't be impacted by lack of new jobs, since people aren't moving here for that reason. And honestly no one knows what will happen with the mass die-off of the Boomers. There might finally be some slack in the housing market. Of the two, my money is on Toronto to weather it better than Vancouver. I'll probably be in my place long enough to outlast any bust.

That is probably true, though it is going to take a pretty deep crash in China/Taiwan/Hong Kong etc. to accomplish this or major changes in immigration law, which I don't see happened, particularly under the Liberals. Toronto is still getting 50-100,000 new arrivals each year, which puts enormous pressure on the housing market. I'm not saying it can't happen, but people are actually inhabiting these houses, which is often not the case in Vancouver, where it is largely property speculation going on.

It's a very strange list that sort of claims to take living expenses into account and yet conveniently ignores them at certain points. Vancouver is just outrageously expensive to rent and buying a house in Vancouver proper is no longer possible even for two professionals with decent incomes. I would drop it out of the top 25 for that reason alone. Toronto is also expensive, though not quite at that level, and I would probably drop it closer to 20. Montreal should be higher than Ottawa and probably higher than Toronto, at least in terms of quality of life, though I am quite satisfied with Toronto (aside from the terrible auto congestion -- fortunately I mostly take transit or bike). Anyway, these lists are basically all ridiculous. There's not a single US city that breaks the top 25?

The Mingus in Europe vol. 1 turned up, and it is the correct disc. It even appears to be a CD not CDr but it can be hard to tell nowadays. Anyway, I am pleasantly surprised. I haven't bought a lot of other music, but I am starting to save up for a Mosaic purchase this summer.

In the home stretch of Slesinger's The Unpossessed. I'm fairly sure this is the second go-around, but it is making a bigger impression on me this time around, mostly looking at how frankly foolish she makes these various dreamers and schemers. The basic plot is that there is a small group of New York leftist intellectuals who have been debating starting a radical magazine for ages when one of them cons an upper middle class patroness into backing the magazine, starting with the purchase of a filing cabinet. This woman and her husband then throw a big party to raise money for the magazine and also for the Hunger Marchers. This is all set in the early 1930s, BTW. Of course, Slesinger is far more interested in the relationships between people and how love, lust and antipathy are far more motivating than party politics, though that plays a role as well, particularly when the young acolytes keep pressing for a harder left stance than the original triumvirate started from. The way Slesinger writes about these internal motivations seem derived from Freudian analysis, so that might be a bit of a turn-off for some people. There is a fair bit of humor throughout, as well as the influence of Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land (and Dostoevsky's Demons as well). It's an interesting novel with a number of characters I don't care about very much. Personally, I would have liked it a bit more if it were zanier, particularly when the file cabinet is delivered. This was reasonably popular among the New York intellectuals (at least those that could stand to poke a bit of fun at themselves) particularly Lionel Trilling, but it was despised by the New Masses crowd (presumably since it was taken as a personal attack on them). Trilling actually wrote an Afterward to The Unpossessed, but it is quite hard to come by (still working on it). I'm really surprised NYRB didn't manage to acquire the rights to republish it, but that's the case.* After this, Bharati Mukherjee's Miss New India. * Actually it turns out the Trilling piece is not that hard to come by. It is titled "A Novel of the 30s" and is reprinted a few places, including in The Last Decade. It is still weird how hard it is to find an edition of The Unpossessed with this afterward, however.

It's very cold out there (-18 C), but essentially no snow. Yesterday and this morning, Toronto was colder than Yellowknife! It's supposed to warm up a bit today and tomorrow will be hovering around freezing. Doesn't change the fact that I have to go out today and am dreading it a bit.

I've certainly enjoyed DeLillo novels and think White Noise is an incredible book. I have plans to reread it, though it falls far enough down the list, it won't be until early 2017! Anyway, I wasn't that taken with Underworld and can't remember all that much about it. I think he was trying a bit too hard to emulate Pynchon here. I'm wrapping up Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (NYRB), which is a weird hybrid of memoir and fiction. There's a section where Hardwick discusses seeing Billie Holliday perform and then becoming a bit of a devotee, even meeting her offstage and then at Billie's hotel. It's hard to tell how much truth there is here, but I am having trouble seeing it as accurate. The book at least so far is largely confided to Hardwick's doings in New York in the 50s and 60s. After this, I move back two decades or so to New York of the 1930s with Tess Slessinger's The Unpossessed (also NYRB).

It's a neat idea. I saw this a day ago. I'll actually be in Chicago at the end of March and will check out the exhibit. I think my family needs a slightly bigger hotel room than this, however...

I just finished Murakami's After the Quake, which was quite entertaining -- short and snappy. I'm currently reading Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, which is sort of a companion piece to his CD of the same name (or vice versa). It's pretty good so far, as we follow a doctor who has lost his license and now caters almost exclusively to treating whores and their johns for VD and occasionally providing abortion services. He's a hard-core junkie to boot, haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams. He and some neighbors are about to go on a short "pilgrimage" to see Jackie Kennedy as she shows up in San Antonio. I should add that it is 1963 and JFK is still alive. As I said, pretty interesting and good pacing.

Agreed. It is far more important to read these books than to obsess over translation. Speaking of other barriers, I am almost done with Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. That is a tough slog, and in some places I have no idea exactly who is talking to whom and whether this is a conversation that happened in the past or it is an imagined conversation. Either seems plausible. I was reasonably well-versed in the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, but I can imagine these novels will feel more and more foreign as time passes, though racial strife seems eternal in the heart of America. I can only imagine the difficulties in trying to translate this, let alone The Sound and the Fury, and then the critics coming along and saying what a mess the translators had made of Faulkner.

Yes, I am not going to sign up to Scribed to find out what axe Morson has to grind. I can say that I read 3 translations of Master and Margarita, alternating chapters like Leeway, and I thought P & V was the best. I don't read Russian, so I can't speak to the accuracy, but this one seemed to convey the ideas the most clearly and generally had more felicitous phrasing -- for me. Though I did copy over in the margins a few places where I thought Burgin was better. It is clear that some people get very heated when there are different translations to choose from, but it seem that some of these people are expecting some Platonically perfect translation, which is of course absurd. For at least a subset of these critics, only reading in the original is acceptable.

Good luck with that. I've basically always found the P & V translations to be the best, though I've only read their Anna Karenina, The Master & Margarita, Demons and Notes from Underground. I'll probably get around to War and Peace in a couple of years.

Midway through Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Enjoying it, some stories more than others. Some of the humorous scenes in "The Fire and the Hearth" are the equal of anything in The Reivers, which is to me just an excellent comic romp. Granted, Faulkner deals with many heavier themes in Go Down, Moses, particularly when looking at black characters with "mixed" blood. I'm going to take a short break before starting in on "The Bear" and read Bove's very short novel Armand.