books this year

though it may seem hard to believe, many people in the performing arts tend to be introverts. perhaps because what we do requires so much giving and extroversion, we need those extra moments of inwardness to recharge.

so with that as a preface, here are some books i've enjoyed most lately...

Here I Am - Jonathan Safran Foer

though my fiance wasn't too happy with me reading a book about divorce in anticipation of our wedding, this book actually made me more excited about the rituals and solemnity involved with marriage. i loved the book's alternation between laugh out loud moments of ridiculousness, political absurdity, jewish discourse and poignant everyday moments of loss and healing. 

“Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.”

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

a book i brought on honeymoon to the amalfi coast and my first time reading calvino. moments of such beauty and such a fine line between poetry and prose... such a pleasurable read.

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. 'There is the blueprint,' they say.” 

Le grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate) - Alain-Fournier

I read this book in English while in paris (also on honeymoon). so nostalgic and dreamy and touching... hard to believe the author was killed in WWI just after completing. great for patient readers who enjoy proust... 

“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?” 

Americanah & Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

I went on a Chimamanda kick this year (how could i not?). while i enjoyed her feminist manifestos, i found myself most moved by her novels. her discussions of race and living in america as a non-american black woman were illuminating, though what drew me most into the story were the love stories interwoven throughout the novel. Half of a Yellow Sun was written so beautifully from the different perspectives, and painted such a picture of nigeria in the 1960s and the complexity of sisterly love. 

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.” 

there've been other books but i think that's enough for one post. :) now i'm reading Nicole Krauss' Forest Dark. curious to see how it goes...

a funny thing happened on the way to the playa...

it's been waaaay too long since i last posted and since, so many huge things have happened, both personally and politically. so, let's start with the good.

my boyfriend and i got engaaaaged. it's lovely and crazy and beautiful and life has already turned into a world of party-planning, venue-booking & dress appointments. (oh, and pinterest. lots and lots of pinterest. *facepalm*)

in other news, it's almost impossible not to spend everyday watching the news in depression, shock & disbelief. today I wrote to my member of parliament urging Canada to increase the number of refugees accepted & act on the U.S. travel ban, not just tweet. here's an easy template from the Canadian Civil Liberties Union: https://ccla.org/contact-your-mp-re-us-travel-ban/

*exhale*

okay. also. here are things i'm loving these days:

Food: i'm on another fad health kick. this means lots of Oh she glows chia puddings & overnight oats & yolos & these coconut dark chocolate truffles. i figured i should reduce my sugar intake but somehow that has only resulted in me making lots of alternative desserts (which are really still desserts but what can you do).

Reading: i'm almost finished re:jane, a re-telling of Jane Eyre set in Flushing, Queen's around 9/11. soooo satisfying. other books I've read & loved recently have included Homegoing which i read as part of my new book club, the poems of leonard cohen & the hours, which i finally got around to reading after loving Virginia woolf & the movie for years.

Travel: in early January, my fiancé & i visited CUBA which is such a fascinating, beautiful country. we spent days wandering Havana & then horseback-riding in Trinidad, snorkelling the coral reef, taking sketchy rides in taxis from the 1950s where we understood only half of what was going on, eating cheese sandwiches & way too many guavas & hiking to waterfalls. (oh, and getting engaged, that happened...)

 

 

Music: the other night, my bestie, fiancé & i attended a bear's den concert at the phoenix, site of all my earliest concert going experiences in high school. their music is fun & beautiful & mellow. the stand-out song of the night was where they unplugged their amplification as the diligent toronto audience fiercely committed to staying quiet enough to hear them play and sing acoustically. despite my bias as a classical musician, i was amazed by how much more i enjoyed the music stripped of all its digital & sonic enhancements.

singing-wise, my favourite performance experiences lately have included singing this movement from a bach cantata at my church job:

& collaborating with my amazing guitarist friend on a gig for Robbie Burns day last friday night. it was our second time collaborating on this gig & we've enjoyed it so much that we're hoping to record a set of burns settings. here's a taste from a rehearsal.

inspirations of late

while i'm normally an avid fiction reader (give me something long & juicy like anna karenina or elena ferrante's neapolitan novels), over the past few weeks i've found myself very inspired by memoirs.

yesterday, i finished paul kalanithi's when breath becomes air, the memoir of a brilliant 36-year-old neurosurgeon with degrees in literature and history who was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. his grapple with what gives life meaning touched me, as he and his wife decide to have a baby despite the fact that it might make his death even more painful ("wouldn't it be great if it did?" he asks. kalanithi didn't believe life was about avoiding suffering). 

he writes about how one can't reach perfection, "but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving." any who, it was beautiful and caused some serious blubbering at breakfast. if you don't have time for the whole book, some excerpts were published in the new york times and the stanford medical journal (this one especially stood out to me). 

another memoir of sorts that i've loved has been ethan hawke's documentary, seymour: an introduction, about the famous piano teacher to the stars, seymour bernstein. bernstein's discussion of why he turned away from the concert stage towards teaching and his own intimate quest for perfection is filled with sincerity and love for his art form. i loved watching him teach his pupils with tender care and generosity and hearing his discussion of how in some ways, the struggle to become a great artist is in some ways the point. 

nice reminders as i continue on this crazy path. ;) 

keeping secrets

i'm a walker. or at least try to be. it's the nicest form of exercise, if you asked me. being outside with the sky, maybe singing to yourself or chatting to a friend or just thinking, or maybe listening to a podcast or something.

anyway! today i listened to the ted radio hour podcast about keeping secrets. it was interesting, ranging from secrets about stealing from the government to "coming out of closets" (not just regarding sexuality) to my favourite one, about the guy at post-secret.

at post-secret...

i come from a culture where people aren't very open about personal things. most of my friends and family have some sort of british background and canadians just tend to be quite respectful and reserved. to this day my mum won't tell us how my dad proposed!

there's something nice about having secrets. and reflecting on what those are reminds us of what it means to be human. having secrets means you can share them with someone you're intimate with, or have things that make you truly yourself that you can hold onto.

here's the ted talk from post-secret.

i love you

soooo this video is too cute. (although i personally would never have this problem #blabbermouth)

patti smith's advice.

love this talk with patti smith and her advice for the young.

"what matters is to know what you want and pursue it and understand that it's gonna be hard. because life is really difficult. you're gonna lose people you love, you're gonna suffer heartbreak, sometimes you'll be sick, sometimes you'll have a really bad toothache... but on the other hand, you'll have the most beautiful experiences. sometimes just the sky. sometimes a piece of work that you do that feels so wonderful or you find somebody to love or your children. there's beautiful things in life. so just know that when you're suffering, it's part of the package. when you look at it, we're born and we also have to die. so it makes sense that we're gonna be really happy and things are gonna be really fucked up too. just know that and ride with it. it's like a roller coaster ride and there're gonna be rough spots but it's all worth it. at least i think it is."

ps: i read just kids, the memoir of her friendship with robert mapplethorpe, earlier this year and totally loved it. kind of a fairy tale about NYC in the 60s and a beautiful meditation on love and art.

impressions of la france

one of my favourite sights so far - parapluies everywhere in luxembourg!!

currently on leg four of my big european journey (first leg was munich, then salzburg, then luxembourg), currently in la petite ville, marmande dans le bordeaux. i'm staying with an older french woman and am already learning oh so much about french culture as a result. i'm taking things easy before a few auditions over the next few days (aka knitting and listening to lots of ted talk podcasts) and have made a few observations about cet beau pays...

1) french people make really funny noises ("pfffffffft" "coucou..." "ooooh la la...")
2) they love to gossip. i keep walking in on the lady i'm staying with full on discussing her "petite chanteuse" with her friends on the phone, or she legitimately remarked to every french person in the super-marché her shock that for lunch i would only want some salad and bread...
... which leads me to: 3) they eat huge lunches and small dinners... i'm adjusting my diet accordingly to avoid giving the lady i'm staying with "trop peur"
4) i don't know as much french as i thought i did.
5) the men here stare like deer in headlights when they see girls in their twenties, even when they're wearing glasses and no make-up like i've been for the past two days...
6) WATCH YOUR FEET. yuck.
7) the idea of peanut butter is absolument ridicule. and has too many calories for older french ladies ;) also, they don't say arachides here, like in canada, meaning my one request in the super-marché was hard to find...
8) people are nicer than i thought they'd be. that being said i'm in a little town, but all the same.
9) driving is scary.
10) it weirds me out that toilets are in different rooms than sinks. i always thought i was a canadian flower child type but turns out i've got some hygienic standards....
11) perfume really is a thing. the lady i'm staying with has bottles everywhere!!.
12) j'aime le pain (though this was never news).

anywho!! that's after only two days. tomorrow we investigate the young singer/opera scene... so much to observe... what they wear, how they sing, how the sopranos scope each other out... #researchproject

à toute à l'heure!