Conductor

If you're down by Nathan Philips Square, check out this head-scratcher of an exhibit: a bunch of helmets and brains boxed in plexiglass, purportedly raising awareness about brain health. 

I sat in two very different audiences this past week.

Wednesday morning, I listened to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra rehearse Beethoven and Brahms, with Augustin Hadelich on the violin and Elim Chan conducting.The audience was 100% white and comprised of members of the monied demographic that most commonly has its Wednesday mornings free.

Wednesday evening, the audience was more diverse and less monied. We gathered in a Toronto Metropolitan University lecture hall to listen to six mayoral hopefuls give their pre-packaged answers to pre-approved questions about what they would do if they were mayor.

Just in case it doesn't go without saying, the major contrasts between the two events were: 

• the early event was uplifting and harmonious, the latter irritatingly discordant
• the morning event displayed astonishing virtuosity by both the violinist and the conductor; the latter showcased the embarrassing lack of even basic oratory skills among the candidates (Daniele Zanotti, the CEO of the United Way, gave the best speech; sadly, he's not running for mayor)
• as grand as the morning event was, it will make little impact on my life as a resident of Toronto; as dismal and pointless as the evening event was, the stakes for me and everyone else in Toronto couldn't be higher

The events had two things in common: both were highly orchestrated (sorry, couldn't resist), and a small-statured Asian woman held everyone's attention. 

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Olivia Chow, third from the right, is the candidate
to challenge in debate because she
has a name-recognition-fuelled lead in the polls.

Recognition

Another way to bird watch in Toronto. This is Ross Ward, just recently returned to the spot outside the coffee shop (was once a Starbucks, then the pandemic hit) at the N/E corner of Wellesley and Yonge. At various locations around the city, he carves and sells little wooden birds on the street. 

I failed a couple of impromptu visual acuity tests this past week.

The first was Wednesday morning when I witnessed an altercation between a cyclist and a driver. (I know. That never happens in Toronto.) Watching from my second floor window, I saw the cyclist use his bike as a weapon to attack the driver. Concerned that the dispute was escalating, I ran downstairs. My plan was just to stand on my front step. When people know they're being watched, their behaviour improves.

In the five seconds it took me to get outside, the fracas had calmed a bit, but the cyclist was still riled up and spouted the most astonishing vitriol at the driver. The driver stood by his vehicle, his front driver's side door open, and recorded the rant on his phone. That's when he noticed me and waved. I waved back and said "I saw him attack you with his bike."

That's when the cyclist, who had his back to me, realized I was there. He suddenly lost all interest his rant. 

The disturbance over, I wished them both a good day and went inside. 

I made a note of what I could recall about the physical appearance of the two men (white guys, about the same height, the cyclist about 10 kg heavier than the driver, both in their 40s, the cyclist had sunglasses, the driver regular glasses with a dark rim). As far as I was concerned I'd never seen either of them before in my life.

So you can imagine my surprise when, about an hour and a half later, the driver of the car was in my front hallway. Until four years ago, he was my neighbour. He comes around regularly because his ex-wife and two children still live at this address. 

He was mortified that I'd seen him lose his temper with a cyclist. I was mortified that I had not recognized him at all.  

I failed the second test when a friend showed me photos of me and Bruce from 1981, which provided conclusive proof that the hair on our heads has, over time, been transformed into fatty tissue and redistributed around our middles. 

One photo had four of us on a couch, me, our friend Jamie, Bruce and someone I did not recall at all.

"Who's that?" I asked.

"Me," said my friend.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

James Webb, J.K. Rowling and The Ukulele Orchestra of Toronto

 

The flowers in my garden this year: no watering, no infestations, nothing that dies.

This past week, I listened to podcasts about the furor over the naming of the James Webb telescope, and the furor over the tweets JK Rowling made about trans people. I also attended a concert, its first since the COVID lockdowns, put on by the Ukulele Orchestra of Toronto.

The podcasts either attempted to understand the background to the furor (Rowling), or told the story of an attempt by a third party to understand the background to the furor (James Webb). 

For both podcasts, attempts to bring further understanding to the furor just pissed people off more. 

Think of it this way. You likely wouldn't want to hear arguments in favour of something without any redeeming social value, such as, say, drunk driving. In the same way, people mad at Rowling don't want to hear her perspective that women are losing hard won rights to trans people. And the people mad at James Webb don't want to hear that it wasn't him personally who purged hundreds of gay people from the US federal public service in the 50s and 60s. 

For the people angry at Rowling and Webb, the stakes are the basic right to live in society. So there's nothing else to understand.  

You may be wondering what this has to do with ukuleles?

Well, this:

A friend of mine plays with the Ukulele Orchestra of Toronto.  Another friend and I went to the concert together. On our way there, we wondered how much ukulele music we could stand before we had to bolt for the door. We had an exit strategy and everything.

But, when we got there, the only seats left made escape impossible, so we had to sit through the whole show. 

I suppose, given what I've already said, it would be better if we completely hated the concert and sat uncomfortably through it. That way it would be a good analogy for at least suffering through someone else's perspective -- that argument in favour of drunk driving, say -- just so you heard it and made the effort to understand. You probably wouldn't change your mind about drunk driving (or ukuleles), but at least you'd know where the other side was coming from. At least you'd have listened.

The ukulele concert was completely delightful. I had no idea ukuleles could be such emphatic, subtle instruments. But I can still make the point that just because you think you won't like something - like someone else's opinion - you should grant them the courtesy of hearing them out.

If you do that, you never know what you might hear, like, perhaps, Bruce Cockburn's "Momma Just Wants to Barrelhouse" played on the ukulele.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

My friend may not be comfortable
that I've posted this picture, 
so I won't say which one is her.

 

 

 

Term Paper

Each spring the trees remember they once had leaves.
Honey locust leaf bud, my backyard.

Most people know two things about J.D. Salinger. One is that he wrote The Catcher in the Rye. The other is that, not long after he became famous as a writer, he retreated to a small town in New Hampshire, where he died in 2010, and never published another word.  

What most people don't know is that, just after going into self-imposed exile, Salinger published his last short story, "HAPWORTH 16, 1924" in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker.

The story is a letter home from summer camp, written by seven-year-old Seymour Glass. 

The letter recounts details of the behaviour of Seymour's cabin-mates (including his five-year-old brother, Buddy), and explains how Seymour was (slightly) injured during an excursion. The injury put him in bed for a day so he had time to write. The last third of the letter is a list of books Seymour would like to have sent to him so he has something to read for the rest of the summer.

Readers of that issue of The New Yorker did not like the story. They accused Salinger of no longer caring for his audience. They complained he had disappeared into his own fictional world, and his characters were speaking only to his other characters. 

Glossing over the details of how I came to read "HAPWORTH 16, 1924", I offer the following. It's not exactly an appreciation of the story, but I feel it deserves better treatment than it's gotten so far.

Seymour Glass was a central character in the world Salinger built in his fiction. Readers met him first in the short story "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" where, in the last sentence, at the age of 31, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

After that, Seymour showed up, in memoriam, in the works penned by his brother Buddy Glass, a sort of Salinger alter ego. Seymour was remembered as an infinitely wise, compassionate man who loved his family, and the world, but also suffered from humanity's glib cruelty. 

"HAPWORTH 16, 1924" is a detailed portrait of Salinger's fictional character, written by the fictional character himself. The story is an opportunity for a reader to spend some hours (it's 25,000 words at least) in the company of an unusual mind.

How unusual?

First of all, how many seven-year-olds do you know who can write 25,000 words in a day? Or use words like "reticulate" (rare), "persiflages" (banter), "nemophilious" (fond of forests), or "pauciloquent" (brief in speech)?

In his letter to his mom and dad, Seymour suggests he has lived at least two previous lives (calls them "prior appearances"), and predicts future events including the circumstances of his own death.

Seymour is a little foul-mouthed -- "As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts" -- and pretty horny for a young kid. He describes, to his parents, his fantasies about seeing a woman who works at the camp "in the raw."

The list of books he requests goes on for pages and includes the complete works of Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, all the Brontes, John Bunyan, Lao-tse and (to give a verbatim example):

Please send anything on the colourful and greedy Medicis, as well as anything on the touching Transcendentalists, quite in our own back yard. Also send copies, preferably without exhibitionist pencil marks on the page, of both the French edition and Mr. Cotton's translation of Montaigne's essays. 

So the reader doesn't have to swallow all of this unaided, Seymour drops a couple of hints about how he came to be so advanced at such a tender age. One is that he recalls the wisdom acquired in his "prior appearances." The other is that he and his brother Buddy have extraordinary powers to absorb and retain information.

On Tuesday afternoon ... [Buddy] bet Mr. Nelson that he could memorize the book Mr. Nelson chanced to be reading within the space of twenty minutes to half an hour.

Seymour also claimed to know how to cut off the communication between his brain and his injury (the one that put him in bed for a day) so that he felt no pain.  

As stories go, "HAPWORTH 16, 1924", is not much of one. There's no plot. No beginning, no middle, no end.  

What the reader gets, at probably higher than the recommended maximum dose, is all Seymour, in a familiar and intimate voice reserved for those people in his life who know him best, indulge him most and forgive him just about everything. 

So those who complained about the story being self-referential were quite right. This is Glass on Glass action; all the reader can do is come along for the ride. 

The promise of relief in the story is in the brief preamble, written by Buddy Glass, suggesting that another story about "a particular party" is in the offing. That story, along with who knows how many others, has not emerged from the horde of documents hidden away in Salinger's New Hampshire home, and likely won't before 2051, or, possibly, ever. 

"HAPWORTH 16, 1924" was never anthologized. If you want to read it (and I know that all of you now do), you either have to find the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker online or in a library, or you can ask me nicely and I'll send you the PDF files.

*****

Returning to the topic of trees, the City of Toronto dropped one off in front of our condo earlier this week. 

Thanks for reading!

Karen

  

We're All Millennials

Someone has left a spoor by the hole. Can't tell the size or height from the mark, but the colour of the paint would indicate a City employee or City contractor.

When I still worked for a living, I was uncomfortable with the habit, most prominently displayed by the HR department, of categorizing the workforce according to generation. You know, Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z and so on. 

I wondered why it was OK to say people had particular characteristics because of when they were born, but absolutely not OK to do so because of their race, religion, or other personal attributes.

You could call the HR mavens full spectrum agists, but I don't want to dwell on that here.

What I want to do, as a person marked Boomer, is talk about how, even though I was 34 before I owned a computer and 55 before I owned an iPhone, I have been "millennified" (just made that word up), meaning my expectations and behaviours as a consumer have been completely conditioned by the Internet.

For example, we're in the process of having three floors of our home painted. We need to pack away books, papers, knick knacks and other crap so we can move bookshelves and other large furniture into the middle of the room so the painters can have at it with our walls. 

We decided to rent some boxes. A pre-turn-of-the-century company name sprang to mind. I got on line, found the company and saw they couldn't give me a quote right away. Their website seemed to say the best way to contact them was with a phone call. This struck me as old fashioned.

So I called. No one answered. I left a message. By the end of that day, no one had called me back. So I sent them an email with my request for a quote. I wondered if there was another company out there that wouldn't make me work so hard to give them my money.

I looked on line. I found a company that could give me a quote right away, promised free delivery and pick up (the other company charged for these things; that's why I needed the quote) and wanted me to book right away. 

So I did. 

Some time after that, I got an email with a quote from the first company (more expensive than the second) along with a little lecture about how I should place my order quickly because I was renting during a period of peak demand.

Then my phone rang. It was the company that had just sent me the email. Someone named Susan called to lecture me again that due to anticipated demand, I'd better make my mind up quick.

Of course, I had already made up my mind, but I was so overwhelmed by talking to a human that I lied and said I was waiting to hear from another company.

After a decent interval, I emailed her, thanked her for giving me a quote, and said I'd gone somewhere else for my rented boxes.

So let's check for signs of millennialism. I wanted to complete my transaction with as little effort as possible (✔️), wanted the lowest price possible (✔️), and was annoyed with the grown up (✔️) who not only lectured me (✔️) about something I was well aware of (✔️) but who also called me "dear" (✔️). But I couldn't possibly say that to her directly (✔️).

I would put that up against any eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old out there.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Friends

Tuckered squirrel on the fence. Our backyard, April 23 2023.

To promote her book about the "quiet catastrophe" of loneliness in America, Sheila Liming talked to Ezra Klein about "the devastating fact that we've grown less likely to spend time together outside of work, our partnerships and family."

The "we" they were talking about seemed to be themselves: two thirty-something, well-off Americans with white collar jobs, homes in the suburbs and young families. Their deepest wish was that they had more time to spend with their friends.

Whether or not their situation is truly devastating, they made me think about what it is exactly that makes a friend.

Liming and Klein talked about friends in utilitarian terms. Friends are people you can rely on to help you, who you can trust to take care of your kids when you're in a bind, who can make your life easier by being available without having to plan a month in advance. 

Liming's idea of hanging out sounded like life in university, where you had a group of people you could spend ample time with having pointless conversations and, probably, drinking quite a lot.

So here's the thing. Most of the people who have helped me recently - like that blue-eyed kid when I fell at the corner of College and Grace Streets - were complete strangers. 

So people don't need to be your friends to help you out.

And the other thing. I hung out a lot in university, but not with just anybody. I selected a group of friends and then I spent thousands of hours yakking and drinking with them. 

Proximity, familiarity and willingness to assist are nice things to have in a friend, but these are not what make a friend. 

A friend is the person who has seen you at your worst, your most vulnerable, your most annoying, and still comes back the next day as your friend.

Liming gave the example of a man she always fights with whenever they get together. They disagree vehemently and part in fury, but, after all of that, they still feel a mutual warmth and fondness. 

So it comes to this, anyone who both knows you well and forgives you is your friend.

Thanks for reading!

Karen 

Hopeless

Because cameras record only light waves, this picture does not convey in any way the incredible cacophony of frog calls coming from this otherwise not-very-lively-looking marsh at the Greenwood conservation area in Ajax, Ontario. 9 April 2023.

This past week I went to the Apple Store in the Eaton Centre to buy a new iPad. My old one was a 7th generation model from way back in 2019. 

I took them up on their offer to start my new iPad under supervision and sat at the table set aside for customers to bring their Apple devices to life (I think they called it the initiation table, which has a creepy ring to it). 

For the purchase, I’d been helped by a guy with “Twix” on the badge hung around his neck, which I assume is what people call him and not his favourite candy bar. I’d so confounded him with my old woman powers that he forgot to try and sell me AppleCare insurance. When he finally remembered he was supposed to extract another $80 from me, I told him the moment had passed. 

At the table of initiations, I took a seat next to a middle-aged woman wearing glasses and a mask, and holding like it was a sick kitten her iPhone 7, issued into the world in 2016, approximately 100 years ago in Apple time. 

She expressed six degrees of dismay to first one and then two and then three different Apple people in green shirts whose job it was to help her, but none of whom could. I was focused on what I was doing so I missed the gist of the cause of her otherwise palpable unhappiness.

I got my gizmo to the point where all it had to do was download my content from the cloud. There was no saying how long this would take and she was sitting right there, and all the Apple people had fled, so I asked her what was wrong.

Long story short, she’d never upgraded her operating system. So she was, what, ten, a dozen, versions behind. Her phone had stopped working. She couldn’t retrieve her photos or open her email. She couldn’t just get a new device because there were things on her phone that were not in the cloud, and she couldn’t bear to lose them. She mentioned she didn’t have a job, and so perhaps her other problem was that she couldn’t afford a new phone.

She thought this might be Apple’s fault, and wondered if next time she shouldn’t just get an Android device. I decided not to say that those also need to have their operating systems updated.

She was in a terrible, entirely self-made bind. I felt bad for her, but, geez. 

Then my device was ready to go. In what could be described as the very least I could do, I called over a fourth Apple person, a fresh one who didn’t know yet how hopeless this all was, and asked if he could help my friend. 

Thanks for reading.

Karen