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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.

I would say that Berlin wanted so desperately to find a Russian socialist thinker who opposed the communism that stemmed from Marx's writings that he often exaggerates the break. You can find several places in Herzen's late letters where he is still calling for revolution, for example. I thought Herzen's memoirs were quite interesting (I read them slightly abridged in the two volume set from Oxford), but at some point or other Berlin calls them as good or better than Tolstoy's War and Peace! Come on, man. Don't blow these things up to that extent. It does them a real disservice. I've actually meant to blog about this for a while, but just haven't gotten around to it. After you finish Berlin and read Herzen, you might be interested in reading Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, which draws very heavily on both these sources.

I read that last year, along with some of the writers he was describing. A very good set of essays, even if he goes a bit over the top in praising Herzen.

I ended up liking Gilead much more than I expected. I understand what she is doing in Lila and in Home, but I am just not sure I want to spend time in these other characters' lives. But I may one of these days. Currently, midway through Machado de Assis's Philosopher or Dog? which is a sort of sequel to Epitaph of a Small Winner. I'm also reading Margaret Atwood's Payback, which is a non-fiction exploration of debt and indebtedness. Next up, more Canadiana: Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? and Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table.

I guess, though that just seems a stupid legacy of cricket. In any case, the umpire had ruled it a dead ball, and in my view (but apparently not the rule book) that would take precedence. It would be like a soccer team trying to shoot after the whistle. Well, no question I will never be any kind of a sports fan, since I think all of them have layers and layers of stupid rules that have perverse outcomes. I did watch the Jays' closer get his last 5 outs and the kid was incredible. I don't know how others felt, but I thought that elevated the game beyond all the other bush-league stuff, including the fans in the stands.

No point in trying to excuse the Jays fans. They were jerks. It will be interesting to see if any rules are rewritten in the wake of this post-season. That rule about the catcher throwing a dead ball back to the pitcher and allowing it to score a run is badly written.

I'm just about done with Epitaph for a Small Winner. I don't find it quite as engaging as his short stories, but it has its moments. The general outlook on life expressed within is pretty bleak, and that is probably mostly what is troubling me. I'm also just about done with Iris Owens' After Claude (NYRB). I find the main character absolutely infuriating, actually a couple of notches past the annoyance I often felt at Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces. I really look forward for terrible things to befall her, as it seems likely to transpire. Actually she reminds me a bit of the "wild woman" who is just "misunderstood" also seen in Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, but the narrator of After Claude has no redeeming qualities that I can see. I can't wait to be through with this one.

That is true, though it is only because they changed the boundaries of Toronto in 1998. It includes a lot of territory that is essentially suburban.

Some interesting twists, turns, heartbreaks, etc. It looks like the Blue Jays are done, but I like the Cubs chances of getting to the next round at least. (I know, I know. Not supposed to say anything...)

Some really interesting projects here. PM sent.

To be honest, I have to agree with the sentiments in the comments that Waterstones was just complete rubbish at selling the things, since the management and staff are wedded to the idea that paper books are the only real books. I'd say well over 90% of my reading is in the form of tangible books, but I don't pooh-pooh the idea of reading digital books, particularly given the awesomeness of Project Gutenberg. I just wrapped up Muriel Spark's The Informed Air, which are mini-essays on how she became a writer, her literary preoccupations (mostly Proust and T.S. Eliot) and her reflections on religion, particularly the Book of Job. This is definitely a book that almost everyone would only flip through once, so see if your library stocks it. Still working my way through de Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner.

So I don't want to get into a big debate about the morality of these labels, but they do appear in eMusic (at least the Canadian version), and I really wish there was a way to filter them out. Now if you do a search for Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis, you end up getting 75%-85% PD labels that are sort of just cannibalizing each other. It's very frustrating and that can't be good for getting newbies interested in jazz. It gets to the point where you need to search for the particular album you are looking for outside of eMusic (Google or Bing or something) and then linking in. (I guess that isn't so different from the Organissimo search function these days...)

I don't quite get it either. With just a single wild card, there could be a team so far ahead of the others, that it could lose the last game of the season and still be the official wild card. In general, with that second spot up for grabs, there are more teams that have a shot at it, and thus keep grinding it out and not slacking off. That's definitely the case in the AL this year. Anyway, this promises to be a fairly interesting October.

Just finished Irène Némirovsky's David Golder. In some ways it is a funhouse mirror version of Silas Marner. I thought it quite interesting. I am struggling to get through Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. I might as well push on (about 100 pages left) but he leaves me absolutely cold as a reader. I didn't see what the big fuss was about Kalooki Nights, and I don't think very highly of The Finkler Question. This will definitely be the last Jacobson novel I attempt. The next up after this is Machado De Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner, which I have never read, despite it being a fairly short book.

It was a total bust here. The sly was so overcast I couldn't even tell where the moon was supposed to be. Very disappointing, esp. for the kids.

They've updated the text on the project page to say that this "may be his final CD," so there is a bit of wiggle room, given that he is still playing gigs. I guess you could say it is mostly likely his final CD.

It is definitely a strange Kickstarter campaign. There are very few people just getting the CD, whereas usually the bottom of the pyramid is pretty wide. There are obviously a few people that really chipped in, but they did make it past $6000. This is one of the few campaigns where it seems my contribution actually moved the needle... Still about a day and a half left if you want in on what may be Junior's last CD.

Yes, being unimpressed is important, but it is just as important that one have a refined, even genteel, enjoyment of the worthy things in life. One cannot be a fan boy and still be considered cultivated.