June 27, 2003

Got up at 9:25.

Dreamed of visiting Cape Breton.

Moira went to Kingston for the next month.

Finished The Three Musketeers.  A magnificent book.

Fierce headache.

Dinner was pork chops.

Started reading Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:  Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.  He's a very interesting writer.

There were few people at the dance party because of the Windsor showcase.  Dawn taught a hustle class.  Tonly led a waltz line dance.

I'm now looking at Harvey Kurtzman's comic book history From AARGH! to ZAP! while waiting for the computer to boot.

June 26, 2003

Dawn taught a mambo class yesterday with the close step and swivels.  At the dance party she led a hand jive line dance--that's really fun.

Dreamed of hearing a legend of an Englishman suspected of selling wartime secrets to the Germans, and thinking he was framed; one of Enid Blyton's Noddy books in the form of a comic book.

Got up at 9:05.

The chapter in The Three Musketeers about the Duke of Buckingham's assassination is powerfully written.

Went to the bank and cashed a couple of cheques.

Dinner was the rest of the fettucine.

Watered the compost.

Baked multigrain bread.  We're out of salt and yeast, and soon we'll be out of pepper.

Finally started entering my diary's April section on the computer.

Tony taught a tango class with promenade and la puerta.

Went to the local karaoke and sang "Still Rock & Roll to Me" and "Rock Around the Clock."

June 25, 2003

Got up at 9:25.

Dreamed of looking into the back yard of our Sackville house in the winter and seeing a black eagle eating a bird, and a bear; attending an evening class, like the copy editing course, and asking the teacher the difference between manse, parsonage and rectory. (According to my dictionary, though they're often interchangeable, an American manse can be a Presbyterian minister's residence, a parsonage its Methodist equivalent, a rectory its Anglican equivalent.)

Today we put on the air conditioning for the first time.

We picked up a new thermostat at Home Depot.

Went to the Folly Kids store and bought the new Harry Potter book [the fifth].

Dinner was fettucine alfredo, which I cooked.  I used shredded mozarella instead of grated parmesan.

Looked at Robert Kaplan's Atlantic Monthly article on how to manage the American empire. It was semi-educated ("emulate Second-Century Rome") and wrongheaded, e.g. its insistence that the world would be "infinitely worse" under United Nations management because the UN "worships peace and consensus" above all.  I was especially amused by his apologies for the School of the Americas [where they trained murderous Central American soldiers].  Neo-liberal wishful thinking.

June 24, 2003

Got up at 9:15.

Dreamed of my family spending time at our cottage before leaving Sackville for a year (which actually happened when I was 12--the people who rented our Sackville home needed it two months earlier than our Mississauga home became available); planning to take a double-LP album along, but finding we had two LPs from different double albums; being unable to find their mates; remembering watching the PBS show Washington Week in Review in the 1980s and recalling how lame Georgie-Anne Geyer's foreign reports were, especially her uncritical use of "neutralizing," the CIA euphemism for killing (an actual memory!).

Went shopping.

Had a dance lesson with Dawn.  She's really friendly, and generous with praise.  She said I did really well today.

Dinner was Harvey's hamburgers.

Read 66 pages of The Three Musketeers!

Went to the Fossil & Haggis karaoke.  A lot of students came, for the first time in a while.  I sang three new songs: "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" "I Want a New Drug" and "Windy."

June 23, 2003

Got up at 8:22.

Dreamed of going on a tour with Donald and John; a version of "How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways" that talked about how to make honey; looking out the front window of our Sackville house and seeing secret agents eating in an opening scene for the Matrix sequel [which I still haven't seen], with a conned agent saying into a walkie-talkie "The bird has left the ground"; then seeing a flashback scene from the back window; a (non-existent) John Wayne cameo in a Star Wars movie.

Another dancing lesson.  It went fast today.  Cynthia's never heard of the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey! [We can't all be sophisticated.]

It was very hot today, with high humidity.

The parents went to Merle's junior-high graduation.

Dinner was Swedish meatballs.

Saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey at the Kingsway (near the dance studio). It's the third time I've seen it, and I'm still figuring it out.  It's deceptively simple, full of complexities just below the surface.  I must read the original Arthur C. Clarke story "The Sentinel" sometime. This is science fiction for grownups. [It predicted phone cards!]

Read 51 pages of The Three Musketeers.

June 22, 2003

Got up at 10:20.

Dreamed of driving to the cottage near Sackville; being unable to finish reading a chapter because of someone talking; reading the end of my Ph.D. thesis and noticing a glaring spelling mistake (not in the actual thesis); Mother calling me "Junior" (which she's never done in real life); seeing the opening credits on TV of the 1974 version of The Three Musketeers (a swordfight).

Father made a list of about a thousand books we're going to sell over the Internet.  I looked at the list and found three I wanted to keep. [We now sell them on ABEBooks.]

Donald, John and Rae came over for dinner.  We ordered Chinese food.

June 21, 2003

Dreamed of seeing British comic annuals in a library; reading about a cinema in Memramcook (an actual village near Moncton, too small for a cinema); seeing a clip from the Joan Crawford western Johnny Guitar; driving through East Memramcook and seeing a conflagration; seeing a clip from the third Indiana Jones movie [which I still haven't seen!] with Jim Broadbent, Vincent Schiavelli and 1940s British actor Marius Goering (I don't think any of them were in it); seeing a movie ending with Denzel Washington visiting his late mentor's home, getting drunk, and a surreal moment where he thinks he's talking to him on the phone.

Got up at 9:56.

I'm still down about being criticized at the dance party.

Went out to Canadian Tire to check the thermostats.

Got the lawn mowed again.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Went to see the last of the Cinematheque's Marlene Dietrich movies:  Josef Von Sternberg's Catherine the Great bio The Scarlet Empress (for the second time). It's a really crazy movie, a lot like Erich Von Stroheim's silents.

June 20, 2003

Dreamed of selling a house in Mississauga, and seeing a big insect in the kitchen. (Our kitchen has a lot of bugs.)

Got up at 9:08.

Went to the Cumberland with Moira and saw the bird documentary Winged Migration.  It was pretty stunning.

Dinner was salmon.

Another headache.

The dance studio had a formal, so I got to wear my black suit.  I was dancing cha cha with Jackie and she said something that hurt my feelings. [She said I didn't know what I was trying to do.] Cynthia comforted me afterward.  I told her she's a really kind person.  I wish I could do something for her.

June 19, 2003

Got up at 9:54.

Baked rye bread.

Took a walk in the Cedarvale Ravine.  In parts of it you can forget you're in the big city.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Found a feature on the online Village Voice describing New York City neighbourhoods.

Lisa taught a waltz class with spirals, something new to me.

Saw an online Washington Times report that the Baathists and fundamentalists will be organizing an insurrection in Iraq next month.

June 18, 2003

Got up at 8:24.

Dreamed of the song "That's Amore" (from hearing it at the dance studio); entering an empty high school too early for an appointment and having hours to kill; moving a lawnmower down a slope.

A new Atlantic Monthly arrived with a big article about how to manage the American empire.  I say, ignore the fine theories and observe the practice. (Iraq does not bode well, as the author argues.) Christopher Hitchens' review of Sidney Blumenthal's Bill Clinton book is titled "Thinking Like an Apparatchik."

Listened to the Mills Brothers record.  They were pretty cool.  I intended to read while listening to it, but I ended up just listening.

Went to the library to return the Vanity Fair issue.  I read a Scientific American article about the 5000-year-old man they found in the Alps.  My theory is that he went off into the mountains to die (like Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers).

Dinner was pork chops (which I fried).

Cynthia taught a rumba class with swivels and the banquero opening.  At the dance party, Dawn led a merengue line dance.  Sonia and her husband brought a baby, whom all the women were looking at.  The foxtrot music was "Up the Lazy River," which was also on the Mills Brothers record.

June 17, 2003

Got up at 7:14.

Dr. Hassan filled one of my reapplication forms, as required.  He was pleased (and surprised) by my decision to return.

Went shopping.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Mailed in the application forms.

The hot weather has finally arrived!

Went to see The 36th Chamber of Shaolin at the Cinematheque.  More cheesy chopsocky, with lots of slapstick to embellish the basic revenge story. (Like The Blood Brothers, it's a Shaw Brothers production, presented in widescreen Shawscope.) I wish I'd been able to see more of this series!

Read 61 pages of The Three Musketeers!

Salon had an article about relatives of 9/11 victims who want a fuller inquiry and feel the press has let them down. (It certainly has!)

June 16, 2003

Got up at 8:16.

Dreamed of the Neil Innes song "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (an actual song I heard in Britain in the early 1980s); seeing our Sackville home from the nearby cemetery, now overrunning the whole neighbourhood. [Like in that W. Somerset story about the Chongqing burial grounds.]

The form for rejoining Employment Supports arrived in the mail.

The new Harper's arrived.  It has an incisive essay by Thomas de Zengotita on the USA's mindset in the post-9/11 era.

Another dance lesson.  We covered a lot of ground.

Dinner was roast beef.

Finally saw The Others on the DVD they gave me when I became an Alliance Cinemas member.  It's a curious haunted house movie, relying on suggestion, with a plot twist [spoiler warning!] borrowed from The Sixth Sense.

June 15, 2003

"You're late!" "Well, tomorrow I can be on time, but you'll be stupid forever!"--The Sopranos

Got up at 10:32.

John and Rae came over for lunch.  We made macaroni.

Baked whole wheat bread.

Found a website with scans of British comics annuals. (We had a few when I was a kid, and I found some lost covers.)

Dinner was lasagna.

Saw the Sopranos season finale in which Tony tried to put his son into a military school.

June 14, 2003

Got up at 9:10.

Dreamed of the Japanese piano piece "Alone" (an actual piece I played when I was young, from Yoshinao Nakada's album Japanese Festival).

Went on a Mensa walk in the Lambton-Baby Point area. (Baby Point is pronounced with a short "A" because it was named for a French-Canadian.) The Humber River was roaring because of yesterday's rainfall. It was scheduled to end at 16:30, but went on to 17:30.  I got a big headache.

Dinner was KFC nuggets.

Went to the Cinematheque to see the 1973 Hong Kong martial arts epic The Blood Brothers, about three heroic soldiers and the Woman Who Comes Between Them. Cheesy but fun, with cartoonish punching sound effects, slow motion dying, and subtitles like "Let's cheers" and "Screw off." [It's a Shaw Brothers production, of course.]

June 13, 2003

Dreamed of being in two movies with Brian Donlevy (the villain in Destry Rides Again): a western set near Moncton airport with Donlevy  scheming to defraud people through a fake census; and a contemporary movie with the actors playing grandchildren of the first movie's characters, Donlevy a legal millionaire.

Got up at 6:57.

Went to the Cinematheque office and bought more tickets.  I'm seeing all the Carl Dreyer movies!

Pruned the cherry tree in the front yard.  The crab apple tree doesn't look too healthy. [Fifteen years later, it's finally dead!]

Bought the new issue of Radar magazine for some junk reading. [The Hilton sisters' slender figures reminded me of my dance teacher Cynthia.]

Dinner was halibut.

Read 56 pages of The Three Musketeers.  Great storytelling!

It's been misty all day.  I like misty weather, especially at night.

There was no dance party this Friday so I went to karaoke at Fanny's on Kingston Road. (This time I found it.) Jim had to leave early so I only stayed for one song: "Downtown."

June 12, 2003

Got up at 10:50.

Went shopping.

Read some issues of Frank magazine that Donald brought over.  Very thin.  I basically just read the "Drivel" quotations!

Dinner was spaghetti.

Tony taught a foxtrot class.  I did twinkles and corkscrews for the first time.

Went to the neighborhood karaoke place, but it turned out the host couldn't make it. (I would have sung "Still Rock 'n' Roll to Me.")

June 11, 2003

Dreamed of a children's picture book with three longish (ca. 30 pages) science fiction stories.

Got up at 10:00.

Went to the Mission:  Possible HQ and got back into it. (I'd decided on it almost two weeks ago, but my cold delayed me.) The parents aren't too thrilled.

Dinner was roast chicken.

Read another 41 pages of The Three Musketeers.

I've started reading You Must Remember This while waiting for the computer to boot.  It's an oral history of New York City in the early 20th century.

Now that my acting classes are finished, for now, I've started going to Wednesday night dance parties again.  Tonight Tony taught a cha cha class with the cross-body lead and the peekaboo.  I didn't find it very difficult.  Armand led a merengue line dance.

June 10, 2003

Dreamed of visiting my aunt's house near Sydney, Cape Breton; going down to the bluff at the seashore there; climbing a knoll like the one in Humber Bay park; finding three watches on the ground.

Got up at 9:58.

Another dance lesson.  We covered a lot today!

Dinner was McDonald's.

Read 37 pages of The Three Musketeers.  It's quite entertaining. [I learned that the beret originated in Gascony!]

Saw two Marlene Dietrich westerns at the Cinematheque, both of which I'd seen before:  Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious and George Marshall's Destry Rides Again.

I got a letter published in Salon!  It was in response to an Allen Barra review of a biography of Robert E. Lee, in which Barra called the Civil War "a gentlemanly affair." I pointed to such specific cases as the march through Georgia and the Confederate policy of murdering black POWs...

June 9, 2003

Got up at 10:02.

Dreamed of travelling down the St. Lawrence River on a ship; writing in my diary that I'd seen an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs.

Had a dance lesson with Dawn.  She's quite a good teacher.

Dinner was macaroni. (We'd made it yesterday for John and his girls, but they were no-shows.)

Rented the DVD of Oliver Stone's football movie Any Given Sunday.  It was too aware of its own grandeur, something of a Greatest Football Story Ever Told.  One hour was enough for me, but I used scene selection to find Al Pacino's climactic pre-game speech.

June 8, 2003

Got up at 10:47.

Finally planted the onions.

Donald brought over some magazines.  The 5.17 Spectator is very good:  I've been reading almost all the articles.

We drove down to the Humber Bay park.  There was fog along the lakeshore, which I like.

Bought two more LPs from the lawn sale:  the Mills Brothers' Greatest Hits and Strictly for the Birds, a Yehudi Menuhin-Stephane Grappelli jazz album of bird-related songs.

Baked raisin bread.

Dinner was pork chops.

Saw the Sopranos episode where Jackie Jr. and crew tried to rob a Mafia card game, with disastrous results.

June 7, 2003

Got up at 10:33.

Dreamed of walking past Sackville's Catholic church.

Went to the Deer Park library and borrowed The Three Musketeers.  I also borrowed last year's Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair (which we didn't buy).  It has a James Wolcott article about '70s vigilante movies.

A neighbour was having a lawn sale and I bought the Miles Davis LP Tutu.  Really cool cover.

Donald came over for dinner, which was salmon.

Went to the last Mensa games night until the fall.  I played a game of Scrabble without keeping score.  Then I played a fun strategy game called Blokus, involving putting Tetris-like pieces on a grid. (I won the second game by a single point.)

The New York Times had a very Timesian expression: "arguable mishandling."

June 6, 2003

Got up at 10:48.

Dreamed of watching The Sopranos (next week's episode where Tony strongarms his ex-mistress into silence) on a threadbare videotape that needed replacing.

Went shopping.

Dinner was spaghetti.

The dance party had a Mexican theme, so I wore a big cowboy hat.  We did a casino with a sort of hat dance.  I'm still not over my cold, so my energy was down. I brought the rest of the gingerbread.  On the way home, someone posed for a picture with me because of my hat. (They thought I was an American tourist.) They had a limbo contest, but I quit after the second round even though I probably could have passed the third.  On the other hand, I guessed right away that the sketch was of a Mexican on a bicycle (see from overhead).

June 5, 2003

Dreamed of going through the streets in my pajamas; walking to our Sackville house and seeing the lights of Honest Ed's above it(?); English translations of the Petzi picture books I used to read in French when I was young.

Got up at 9:38.

Went to the library and borrowed the Harry Potter mini-books Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages.

Had lunch with Pui and Gordon.

Fierce headache.

Finished Freddy Goes to the North Pole.

The parents went to London for the day.

Saw two of Marlene Dietrich's silent movies at the Cinematheque with a live piano. (Like Garbo, she wasn't quite as thin in her European movies as she would be after going Hollywood.) In I Kiss Your Hand, Madame it's surprising how much of her persona was already emerging.  In Three Loves she reminded me of Metropolis actress Birgitte Helm.

June 4, 2003

Dreamed of an Archie comics collection; moving into a new house in Halifax; not knowing what to do over the long Easter weekend; walking through Cape Breton with the Lord of the Rings fellowship; being mistaken for communists by 1950s paranoiacs; dancing cha cha and not being sure what steps to make.

Got up at 11:22.

Another dance lesson (including cha cha). As I expected, I was off form because of my cold.  I gave Cynthia a piece of my gingerbread.

Dinner was salmon.

Had the last drama class.  Donna and I performed the whole scene from The Enchanted, with Jennifer as the Ghost.  She played the scene in Donna's black coat, which had some white chalk dust on it, making her look even ghostlier!

June 3, 2003

Dreamed of going to see Rancho Notorious at the Cinematheque, but the screen had been moved from the south wall to the northwest corner; seeing a Tommy gun among the seats; watching a Charlie Chan movie being filmed.

Got up at 11:02.

Baked gingerbread.

Dinner was I.G.A. chicken.

Went to the Goodenough Association meeting at the athletic club near York Mills.  I met Desiree McGraw [whom I knew when staying at Goodenough College in 1995], who may be running for Parliament in the next election. [She didn't.] The guest speaker was Edward Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail. (He's a bit of a rambler.) Afterward I asked him how you become a proofreader.  He said the job doesn't really exist anymore. [And it shows, alas.]

Read 60 pages of Freddy Goes to the North Pole.  Another clever book indeed.

June 2, 2003

Charles the Rooster on meeting a wolf: "I don't like this fellow.  I don't like the way he looks at me.  He makes me feel as if I didn't have any feathers on"--Freddy Goes to the North Pole

Dreamed of a visitor from outer space; a Zero brand of appliances; tourists visiting a U.S. military base to meet an official who wrote a book about the Vietnam War.

Got up at 10:48.

Hope I'm not getting a cold!  I have a severe sore throat.

Dinner was pork chops.

Rented the DVD of Spike Lee's 25th Hour.  It was long and uneven, but well acted and often powerful.

Cancelled tomorrow's appointment with Dr. Hassan in case I'm not well enough.

June 1, 2003

Mrs. Wiggins the cow: "Ella and Everett know exactly what they'll get for supper if they really do come back.  Broomstick pudding--that's what they'll get"--Freddy Goes to the North Pole

Got up at 10:54.

Dreamed of being a WWII refugee squatting in a brickyard in Amherst, N.S.; seeing a dead mother come back to life.

Finally got the lawn mowed.

Dinner was roast pork.

Saw the Sopranos episode where Paulie and Christopher got lost in the woods and Tony and Bobby had to go find them.

May 31, 2003

Dreamed of a cable TV documentary channel called Happy Days TV; the song "Santa Lucia"; a double-decker busload of people transported back a few years to Scotland in a Harry Potter adventure; being about to see the movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and marking it in a diary with big, fancy letters.

Got up at 10:56.

It rained heavily and I couldn't mow the lawn.

Got an issue of Now magazine with a critique of Dundas Square.

Dinner was tacos.

Baked multigrain bread.

Saw two Josef Von Sternberg- Marlene Dietrich movies at the Cinematheque:  Blonde Venus and (for the second time) Dishonored.  Today's movie stars don't have much sex appeal compared to people like Marlene.  My back got sore.