Back in Toronto after a 7am flight from Calgary. The flight landed early for a change. 🛬
The Vietnamese food here in Calgary is quite memorable. Here’s the grilled pork and spring roll vermicelli at Lemongrass West on 51st Street SW.
En route to Calgary, where there is a severe weather alert for smoke from the fires in BC.
Just an ordinary Friday night chilling with the Winnipeg crew.
Good morning!
Enjoying a simple lunch of borscht and a ham and cheese panini at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.
The view from my hotel room in Winnipeg this morning. The smoke seems to be getting worse from the fires up north. Air quality was bad yesterday and I doubt it will get any better today.
My office for the day, hearing exams at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.
Just landed in Winnipeg 🛬
Happy International Left Handers Day! 🖋️
Rereading Proust
Back in 1996 I read Proust’s A la recherche du temps passé ( translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time) and I did it in only 10 weeks. I understand that this might be a world record, and although it’s not one that I’m proud of, it was certainly a unique experience speed-running Proust.
Here’s how it happened.
In 1996 I was the pianist for Heather Pawsey when she won the Eckhardt-Grammate Competition in Brandon, Manitoba. As part of the prize, Heather was asked to give a 15-city tour across Canada and she asked me to be her pianist for the tour, which hit spots all over Canada including Sackville, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Brandon, Saskatoon, and all the way west to Vancouver.
This was back in the golden age of touring, when we only had one concert every 48 hours on average. 1996 was a time before the days of readily available internet, so although I had an email address, I rarely used it.
Heather and I had a lot of time on our hands on this concert tour.
Planning ahead, bought all three volumes of the Penguin edition of Proust (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin) two weeks before the start of the tour and started Swann’s Way.
Once the tour started, there was a lot of downtime, whether in airports, on flights or buses, at concert venues, and especially holed up in hotels or B&Bs, frequently with frigid weather outside.
Over the course of these six weeks, I read much of Proust, just starting Time Regained as the tour ended. A few weeks later I finished the rest of the final book, much of it read on my SkyTrain commute every day from New West to downtown Vancouver.
As my reading practice deepened over the following years, I was glad that I had made it all the way through this beast of a novel, but disappointed that I had speedrun it rather than taking the time to enjoy the details.
Which is why I’m once again making a second run through Proust’s mega-novel. This time I’ll be taking it slow, reading only 2-4 pages per sitting and enjoying the endless flow of Proust’s narrative.
If I’m consistent, I estimate that this will take me between 3 to 5 years, perhaps longer. It’s feels like traveling on a sub-light spaceship to another solar system where the trip is planned in years and decades rather than days or weeks.
But this time around I aim to savour the small moments, page by page. 📚
I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy a notebook again. There was a sale in our area and I bought 23 Leuchtturms and 2 Moleskines. Does this qualify as an addiction? 🖋️
Anne-Laure le Cunff: Mindful context switching: multitasking for humans
There are many tips out there—the most common one being to focus on the most important task first—but few address the systemic complexities of managing your time and energy when you have a very long list of important and competing tasks as well as other people to take into account.
Ontario Greenbelt plan influenced by well-connected developers, AG says
A terrible loss of greenbelt area outside Toronto, all to enrich Doug Ford’s cronies.
This is a photo that was taken during a recital with Krysztina Szabo at Tapestry Opera in Toronto’s Ernest Balmer Studio on March 21, 2020. This was one of the first livestream-only recitals with no live audience, happening right at the very beginning of the pandemic, and was the last recital of the 2019-2020 season in Toronto. A few days later, every performing venue shut down in the city.
The Toronto Pen Shoppe, Toronto’s newest pen store at the Distillery District. Nelmar Cornes is the owner and he plans on carrying some hard-to-find inks and papers in the coming months. 🖋️
The waiting room for my favorite barbershop.
The always-on mindset can be both a blessing and a curse for those of us in the creative arts:
Creativity is something you are, not only something you do. It’s a way of moving through the world, every minute, every day. If you’re not driven to an unrealistic standard of dedication, it may not be the path for you. So much of the artist’s work is about balance, so it’s ironic that this way of life leaves little room for it.
Once you acquiesce to the demands of the crative life, it becomes a part of you. Even in the midst of a project, you still look for new ideas each day. At any moment you’re prepared to stop what you’re doing to make a note or a drawing, or capture a fleeting thought. It becomes second nature. And we’re always in it, every hour of the day.
Currently reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 📚
Finished reading: The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2) by Liu Cixin 📚
Pork ramen with spicy garlic broth: the perfect lunch for a dark, rainy summer day.
