Classical Pursuits Editor’s note: What does Reconciliation look like? Across North America, many of us may want to engage more sincerely and meaningfully with reconciliation with Indigenous communities. In this post, authors Susan Crean and Joyce Wayne invite you to consider how the arts can help us take the first steps of this journey. Join them for their Toronto Pursuits 2024 seminar Reconciliation: When History Becomes Truth. In a recent opinion piece in the Toronto Star, Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé reported on the decision of the town of Greenstone near Thunder Bay, Ontario, to permanently r ..read more

Classical Pursuits There is something I believe about literature: Nonfiction allows us to learn about stuff, but fiction allows us to learn about us. Reading fiction can help us to become better people. It fosters our senses of empathy and sympathy. If we think about and try to understand the motives of the characters in a novel or short story, we are more likely able to understand better them better—and ourselves in the bargain. Films can do that, too. The films we’ll discuss in my Toronto Pursuits seminar on the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa do that amazingly well. These films must ..read more

Classical Pursuits Although Charles Dodgson died over a century ago, his alter ego Lewis Carroll is still very much alive. Alive as the young in heart are forever alive. The longevity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass leads us to ask — is there greatness to humour, any importance to non-sense? What keeps a fictional world alive? That’s one of the questions that will drive our seminar, The Curious Child of Lewis Carroll, at Toronto Pursuits 2024. We identify something as a Great Book partly by how it resonates over time through the lives of other writers, thinkers ..read more

Classical Pursuits [Editor’s note: We’re so happy to welcome Rosemary Gould back to Toronto Pursuits for the first time since 2019. She’ll be leading The Storytellers, an exploration of narrative, drama, and storytelling in poetry. In this blog post she introduces her method for discussing poetry. For many years, Rosemary has turned the poetry-wary into poetry lovers through her skilled leadership.] When I lead a poetry seminar, we always begin by reading the poem out loud. The poem then has a presence in the room, and when we start to discuss it we are more prepared to savor its beauty and ri ..read more

Classical Pursuits The front page of the New York Times, November 11, 1918 Just give me the facts, I can figure it out from there. For a long time, this is how many people have approached the news. Although the history of journalism shows that it’s an ever-changing concept, AI researcher and data scientist Jonathan Stray suggests that “factual reports of current events” is a useful common definition. But what people are reading, listening to and watching today is definitely NOT just the facts. In fact, the focus is ever more sharply on analysis, explanation, and context. As Stray wrote back in ..read more

Classical Pursuits The portraits, landscapes, interiors and still lifes of the Dutch masters show us a world full of activity: people sailing, trading, studying, working, reading, singing, drinking, and much more. It’s fun to marvel at the rich colours and textures, the dynamic skies, the dramatic Biblical scenes, and the visual jokes that help us laugh at our human condition. We can also look at these paintings of Dutch masters through a more introspective, expansive inner eye. How did these artists use this inner eye to represent their world in two dimensions? How can we use it to see these ..read more

Classical Pursuits … but were afraid to ask. Hello, I’m Rick Phillips. I am a freelance writer, reviewer, teacher, speaker, broadcaster, podcaster and concert host, all in the field of classical music. I regularly host travel tours to European and US cities to attend classical music festivals and events. For 30 years I worked in a variety of locations and positions in the Music Dept. of CBC Radio, the Canadian public broadcaster. From 1994 to 2008 I produced and hosted Sound Advice, my own national radio show — a weekly guide to classical music and recordings. Before the CBC, I was a musician ..read more

Classical Pursuits (Untitled) Jazz Club, by Beauford Delaney, 1950 Existential angst, jazz cats, cheap hotels, smoke-filled basements … while Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood is now filled with luxury boutiques, in the 1950s it was a different story. As the city emerged from Nazi occupation, Saint-Germain reclaimed its place as a centre of new ideas and daring new works of art, philosophy and music. Who lived, worked and partied in Saint-Germain? How did they shape the Paris they lived in—and the one we love so much today? In this post, we’ll visit three classic Left Bank cafés and ..read more

Classical Pursuits Parma ham in a grocery store in Bologna, Italy, with some slippers in the background I had a lot of fun reading the recent New York Times article on the joy of small, everyday souvenirs: “Want a Vacation Souvenir? Buy Toothpaste.” Like author Joshua Hunt, I love visiting drugstores when travelling abroad. Along with supermarkets, bodegas and corner stores, stationers, and secondhand shops. This is partly for practical reasons — so many times I see a beautiful and distinctive picture, rug, cookbook, or vase, but I share a studio apartment with my husband and our Yorkie. We ju ..read more

Classical Pursuits Participants greet each other in Old Vic, the “hub” of Toronto Pursuits Nearly 80 book, music and culture lovers gathered this past July for our annual “salon in the sun,” Toronto Pursuits. At our longtime oasis, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, we read and looked and listened, ate and drank, laughed and debated, greeted friends old and new. Most of all, we talked—about love, death, fear, desire, and beauty. About how Kierkegaard can make you crazy, how Rachmaninoff came to have such a divided reputation, how the women painters of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Grou ..read more