Field Trip City

It sure got late in a hurry. Speaking of late, I was almost late for the opera tonight due to my foolishness in thinking I could get from my house to Queen Street in 45 minutes during rush hour. I made it with a couple of minutes to spare, but it would have been embarrassing if I'd been any later. Verdi's Don Carlos was a heretic-burning, Oedipus complex-flaunting, revolution-failing good time, though it was a long show at over 4 hours with two intermissions. I wasn't as familiar with it as I was going into Mozart's and I think that affected my opinion of it. The vocalists were better, but I was expecting more of a spectacle given the subject matter. It was still very good, nonetheless. Tomorrow I'm meeting with my group to start talking Death in Venice.

Today I visited the Toronto Public Library's Osbourne Collection of Early Children's Books, where my class looked at a ton of publications of Robinson Crusoe through the years. It's fascinating the kind of things that were used as propaganda for kids (wartime declarations, stories to prepare children for death). I bet there's a whole slew of Oz books in that building. They're currently featuring an extensive Edward Gorey collection in glass cases.

Between the opera and my Bibliography course, I feel so privileged being able to do what I'm doing here. I've been experiencing literature in a way I never thought possible - I'm actually able to engage with texts touched and signed by the people I read. U of T is extraordinarily surreal in a lot of ways due to its size and history. I should take advantage of what it has to offer while I'm here.

I signed out copies of Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Murnau's Faust to watch over the weekend. The Ontario Arts Council emailed me and told me I collated my grant applications wrong, which doesn't sound right because I took painstaking measures to put them in the right order, but I thanked them for correcting the error without forcing me to resubmit. I finally activated my new VISA and have as of yet not used it. Such restraint. Ren's in town and we're hitting up Darjeeling on Monday.

The air is getting colder. I have a lingering cough but it doesn't feel too serious.