Tuesdays

For me in autumn, Tuesday night is the night for opera rehearsal.  I'm in the chorus of the non-professional Toronto City Opera and we rehearse at the Bickford Centre theatre near Christie Pits. (The big work is by the soloists.) This year we're putting on Carmen and The Merry Widow.  It's a shame that the theatre is idle for half the year when we aren't using it:  it would be nice if they had a group that put on plays there!

The early rehearsals in the fall are my favourite part.  We're just concentrating on learning our music and not yet working on our stage movements, which comes in the new year, with performances in late February and early March.

In the early part we often get separated into two groups:  the men go downstairs to learn their part while the women learn their own part upstairs.  I used to get the impression that the girls were always learning faster than we did! (That's partly due to the group having more women than men, so they have more of a critical mass.)

What do you consider romantic?

Some years back I saw the John LeCarre movie The Constant Gardener.  Not only was it a fine thriller, it was a great love story too!  Ralph Fiennes is married to Rachel Weisz, and the movies about how she lives for this cause and he ends up living for it too, then she dies for that cause and he dies for it too!  That's the sort of love story Hollywood is generally afraid to make these days.

My favorite romantic Disney movie is Lady and the Tramp. (It's funny how I can feel more comfortable watching love between animals than between people!) Another romantic movie I like is the western Stagecoach, with its romance between outlaw gunfighter John Wayne and outcast lady of the evening Claire Trevor.

Don't get me started on the romance genre today! Titanic was an exercise in shamelessness!  These days they think the romantic rival has to be completely loathsome because they're afraid to allow any doubt about which guy the girl should prefer.  Not to mention romances where the man is twenty-odd years older than the woman! (I guess that started with Audrey Hepburn being paired with Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper and Cary Grant...)

In the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin the heroine's Greek father says, "Love is what's left when being in love burns away."

Series books

When I was thirteen or fourteen I went through a Hardy Boys phase.  My favorite character was their plus-size sidekick Chet Morton.  They'd always get into danger but solve the mystery and nail the crooks in the end. (And they could do things like fly planes!) I also read several Tom Swift books, but never tried Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins.

I've read all the books in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  I like them, but the series I really love is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is a sort of atheist counterpart to C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. (I tried The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but did not like it.  It's moralistic nonsense, and having children fight in a holy war is remarkably tasteless.)

In recent years I've read Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series.  When I was really young, I think I read all of Enid Blyton's Noddy books.  Someday I'm going to read the whole series of L. Frank Baum's Oz books!

I've also read all the books in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series.  They're wonderful books, way better than the shameless TV show. Someone's written a spinoff series about Laura's daughter, and I may read that someday.

Tuesdays

For me in autumn, Tuesday night is the night for opera rehearsal.  I'm in the chorus of the non-professional Toronto City Opera and we rehearse at the Bickford Centre near Christie Pits. (The soloists do the big work.) This year we're putting on Carmen and The Merry Widow.

The early rehearsals in the fall are my favorite part.  We're just concentrating on learning our musica and not yet working on our stage movements, which comes in the new year, with performances in late February and early March.

In the early part we often get separated in two:  the men go downstairs to learn their parts while the women learn their own parts upstairs.  I used to get the impression that the girls were always learning faster than we did!

The person you owe an apology to

You know something that annoys me about some English people?  It's that sometimes when you apologize to them, they'll automatically lean on you to apologize to a third person as well (like your parents if you're a kid). One hates to reward them.  It isn't that they're jerks, just that they can't imagine doing it any other way.

(It's pretty easy to apologize for someone else's behavior, of course.)

In Toronto people apologize to me when I bump into them.  I often say "It's OK" to ease the situation.

Should governments apologize for past crimes like slavery and the ethnic cleansing suffered by the First Nations?  Well, by itself it's only words.  But if we aren't willing to say those words that says all too much about us.

The Chinese word for "I'm sorry" is "Duibuqi" or "Duibuzhu." I wonder if the word "dweeb" comes from that?

There you go...

I remember in the 1980 presidential campaign debate when Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter, "There you go again!" A lot of people said it was a killer line, but what was so great about that?  It sounds like something a teenage girl with an attitude would say to her parents.

It's depressing that so much of today's politics turns on soundbites like that one.  I remember how during the F.L.Q. crisis in October, 1970, some reporter asked Pierre Trudeau "How far will you go?" and he answered "Just watch me!" People ended up focusing on the line itself and ignoring the serious issues involved.

Another soundbite that annoys me is "left-liberal." While "the conservative right" is redundant, "the liberal left" is an oxymoron!

I'm still sore about last year's Democratic primary when the Clinton camp wanted to associate Sanders with white male privilege, so they came up with the soundbite "Bernie bros"! That was a cynical appeal to identity politics, and an insult to the women and blacks who did support Bernie. But in the end stuff like identity politics and vote suppression that had worked in Hillary's favor during the primaries worked against her in the general election.  Call it karma.

Best & worst times to write

I tend to write on my blog late at night.  I'm always surprised by how much time I end up spending on writing, because when I'm actually doing it the time passes quickly.  Sometimes late at night I'll spend a long time adding posts to online quarrels at sites like The Huffington Post, such as in defense of Bernie Sanders. (I think he's a genius!)

I sometimes go through dry stretches on my blog, especially in summertime.  Lately I've taken to seeing movies just so I'll be sure of having something to write about.  But there are also times when I can go on and on...

I've never tried to get my writing published, so I haven't experienced rejection.  In L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon there's a funny bit where the girl submits a manuscript written on both sides of the page, not realizing that you're only supposed to write a manuscript on one side!

In Mark Twain's manuscripts they found some strange numbers at places in the margin, which nobody could explain.  Finally, the present-day writer Fran Liebowitz suggested that at the end of the day Mark Twain counted up the number of words he'd written and jotted them down.  It turned out that she was right!