This month: a very official document arrives unexpectedly, music from the 80s, and for the first time in a while, I read a book. This month’s header comes from the print shop at Massey College in Toronto. HVW and I visited during Doors Open, and it was a revelation, architecturally and institutionally.
Mr. Carney’s top priority
You may or may not know that Canada got a new Prime Minister on 14 March of this year. Although Mark Carney had a lot of things on his plate1 after his swearing in ceremony, I like to believe that his very first priority was to sign this certificate2.
Now ,with that out of the way, Carney can go on to less important things: like running the country3.
Music Recommendation from the 1980s
The story so far: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was the greatest thing to come out of the 1970s, musically. On to the next decade…
I started out devoted to the new wavers like Elvis Costello and art rockers like Japan. But I also tried to learn about jazz, and (a little) opera, as well as the newer minimalists like John Adams.
And in truth, there were great albums in that period; think U2’s Joshua Tree. Brian Eno and David Byrne knocking it out of the park with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the sublime Avalon by Roxy Music.
For me though, I got a huge kick out of Dwight Yoakam’s revivification of the Buck Owens’ Bakersfield sound in two albums: Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. in 1986 followed by Hillbilly Deluxe in 1987. HVW and I went to see him at the O’Keefe Centre4 (when that was what it was called). It was so refreshing to see Toronto’s most august performance hall filled with a crowd of beer swilling good-timers. Loved every minute.
The Sense of an Ending
The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 book5 by Julian Barnes. It won the Booker Prize. I used to have a copy, but somewhere along the way from Oakville to Hoboken to Toronto, it was purged. Did I read it? I have no idea6.
But I should have, because it is splendid78.
It is kind of a mystery story, where an aging narrator tries to make sense of events from his days in uni. He gradually, then suddenly, realizes that his version of events, which he has conveyed to us, is highly unreliable. Along the way he ruminates on life, growing old, soccer/football and coming to terms with your own achievements and disappointments.
It is full of stuff like this:
But time . . . how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
And this:
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
There are genres of fiction for Children and for Young Adults, but after that everything just goes into the Adult category9. There should be one for those of us who are past the half-way point10. If there were such a category, The Sense of an Ending would be genre defining.
- Mostly related to NOT becoming the 51st State. ↩︎
- The certificates don’t print themselves, someone has to request them. It wasn’t me, but it was a very nice gesture by an old friend (who happens to bake great rhubarb pies). ↩︎
- He might take inspiration from this month’s header image. ↩︎
- aka Hummingbird Centre; aka Sony Centre; aka Meridian Hall. ↩︎
- It is also a pretty good film from 2017 starring Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter, Billy Howle, Emily Mortimer and Michelle Dockery. The plot is not exactly the same, and it doesn’t quite capture the protagonist’s self-delusion, but I like it a lot. ↩︎
- I haven’t been an avid reader since my early teens, but have seriously fallen out of the habit in the past decade. I think I must have read it, but have absolutely no recollection of doing so. Reading it recently absolutely felt like the first time. ↩︎
- As a bonus it is only 150 pages. HVW often chides me for saying that the best novels are in the 100-200 page range. She thinks that is an arbitrary rule, and that some stories and ideas take more pages to develop. The Sense of an Ending proves my case. ↩︎
- Remember the word “splendid” from last October‘s 3 things? ↩︎
- OK OK – serious fiction, which deals with serious topics, like the human condition, is not a genre; it’s literary fiction. But there could still be a genre for fiction devoted to getting old. ↩︎
- Considerably so, I’m afraid. ↩︎
HVW is (once again) correct.
“HVW often chides me for saying that the best novels are in the 100-200 page range. She thinks that is an arbitrary rule, and that some stories and ideas take more pages to develop.”