Travelling for Theatre
We just came home from a brief overnight trip to go Canadian Stage’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was an incredible production, especially the performances of Paul Gross and Hailey Gillis. We also got to enjoy a very nice dinner beforehand, and a quiet afternoon at the Royal York. I know that such a short trip might not be worth it for some, but I enjoy the brevity of the breather, and the feeling of coming home to a place I used to call home.
And it’s helping me to actually get to see all the sights that we didn’t actually get to when we lived there — like the Hockey Hall of Fame, which was a bunch of fun. Maybe the whole 3D theatre was a little cheesy, but I got to see Maurice Richard’s sweater and that was well worth the price of admission.
On Collected Editions
Now, whether or not collected editions are a good thing or a bad thing depends on what kind of reader you are. For me, they can be a bit onerous because it can be very difficult to get through them because it feels like I’m pumping hours upon hours into a book only to not get very far in it. Then I get impatient and switch books. When I’m in a reading slump it can get really disastrous and make it harder to read anything else.
But I do not represent every reader. Some people really love to have one book they can go to for multiple volumes. And even I appreciate the gathering of rare material that is unfindable modernly into one place and one price. So don’t let the size of The Price of the Ticket discourage you. It was a collected volume that was worth the time and the effort and did not break my normally quick reading flow.
Everything in One Place
Baldwin’s non-fiction works particularly beg for a collected edition due to their original appearance in periodicals and disparate ones at that. He had famous pieces published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The New York Book Review, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s just to name a famous few. In this edition, you get all of these articles and more: you also get the collections of his non-fiction essays.
As you read it, you get a picture of Baldwin and his experiences as well as the unique perspective he brings to what he reads and the films he watches. He not only writes about race in America but also his time abroad. He is more than just the Civil Rights Movement, but his heart is also firmly in Harlem, and the injustices he saw and was at the receiving end of made him who he was and how he wrote. Some of the pieces also give us a look into his writing process as well.
Something for Everyone
There is truly something for every non-fiction reader here. There are personal essays, but also some more fact-based articles and reporting. Some pieces on travel. Other work is the more famous essays that compose The Fire Next Time (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago). I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, but I particularly enjoyed Baldwin’s writing on film collected in The Devil Finds Work, a book originally published by the Dial Press in 1976. Baldwin is not well known for his film reviewing, but he really should be because they are fantastic.
Coming Home
Even when we leave for a very short trip, we make sure to leave more than enough food and water for the cats. And when I say more than enough, I mean more than enough. For an overnight trip, we leave out enough kibble for at least three or four days. So, when we get home, I have some expectation that there will be some kibble left. Except there wasn’t. Not really. And, wow, that means some very chunky cats had some smorgasbord that will go down in kitty legend. However, it’s also comforting that upon weigh-in, Wesker didn’t lose any weight so I know she got enough.
