Basic Economics. Basic Logic.

The Best Explanation Of What's Really Going On With The American Deficit http://bit.ly/fy0vTE via @moveon

Yoga in Toronto. Metro Convention Centre

Assaulted Women's Helpline. Gala Fundraiser. April 15, 2011

Someone else will have a better photograph of me at the fundraiser for the Assaulted Women's Helpline last night, but I couldn't resist experimenting. Mirror image with Flash!

It was a fantastic evening! Well attended with good  speeches, entertainment, food and an interesting silent auction as well as an exciting live auction. It was gratifying to know that this necessary service will continue with the help of all its donors and friends.

Sandra Diaz read a very moving poem with three words...'someone you know'...that repeated throughout the poem poignantly created images of women who experience abuse as our friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc.  Too true and a reminder this 24 hour crisis line for assaulted women is an essential service.Sandra Diaz, Rebecca Ng and the women who organized this event are to be congratulated. As is Huong Pham who is the Executive Director of the AWHL.

SPRING DAY. TORONTO

It's beginning to feel like spring!

Out and About in Toronto.

The escalator at the Lawrence Station was working in both directions on Sunday.It must be the longest one in the TTC system and it is often being repaired in one direction for what seems like weeks at a time.

Outside the AGO, a piece of Henry Moore sculpture.

Artists enjoying the Art Gallery of Ontario. April, 2011.

This afternoon, I went to the Paterson Ewen exhibition at the AGO with my niece, who is an artist, and one of her friends who is also in the aets, One can't take photographs within the gallery, except for this magnificent area,

ILE D'OR. A Review.

Reviewed by Eric McMillan in Town Crier newspapers, Toronto, Sept. 2010

http://www.editoreric.com/torontoreads/TR201007.html

Ile D’Or

Mary Lou Dickinson

Novel, 2010

Inanna Publications, trade paperback $22.95

Old-fashioned (in a good way) Canadian story Simple story. Two 40-something Quebec natives who have been living in Toronto separately return to their northern hometown of Ile D’Or. In the mining town they meet former friends and remnants of families. They talk a lot, try a few tentative flings, eventually leave. Complex story. Emotionally. Especially as they hook up romantically with two others of their generation who never left town. All four have pasts — ghosts of dead ex-lovers, marriages on the rocks, family mysteries, and professional doubts — which twist together during the visit.


The most important character though may be Ile D’Or itself, a grasping town built on the greed for gold, on a rough-hewn individualist morality, and on the division between the English and French. Our protagonists were born in the hard-scrabble 1930s, raised into the narrow-minded 1950s and are returning to their roots in 1980, shortly after the first Quebec referendum, which rejected the separatist option. In many ways Ile D’Or is a far different world now from the one they grew up in, but many of the problems that drove away the young people remain and now in approaching middle age they have to face them.


Toronto writer May Lou Dickinson, herself a former Quebec northerner, somehow keeps all these emotional, social and political threads straight to weave an involving story of ordinary people figuring each other out. There’s something very Canadian in the content with its characters’ experiences in snow-driven cabins, with horses stuck in swamps, and on frozen lakes — the northern survival theme should please our literary theorists. But the unadorned, earnest style is also very much of this country’s past. The writing is quite direct and accomplished, especially given that this is the first novel for the 70-something author. Perhaps it’s a little old-fashioned — but old-fashioned in the way readers like, telling a complicated story simply and effectively.

And every now and then Dickinson’s characters throw in an explicit but honest sexual reference (to throw off anyone who’s dwelling too much on the author’s age). If I have any disappointment with the novel, it’s that the story doesn’t come to any great climax. Certain revelations are made. Some relationships are resolved. Conclusions are reached. But life goes on in the town and the protagonists continue to muddle through their messy lives. But that too may be very Canadian. Nothing overly dramatic, nothing bigger than life. Our modest lives as they are.

Farzana Doctor. Six Metres of Pavement.

Six Metres of Pavement . Published by Dundurn. Spring 2011.

I have just finished reading Farzana Doctor's second novel and highly recommend it. Follow Ismail and Celia gradually getting to know each other, crossing the boundaries of their own losses and tragedies to sharing with each other. Moving on into new mysteries. Fatima, a young bisexual woman, whom ismail meets at a writing group, becomes central also as she deals with her parents rejection, where Ismail finds himself somehow involved with this situation in helping her. Set in downtown neighbourhoods of Toronto, the city, as well as the characters, spring to life on the pages of this intriguing and moving novel.