A French University is Coming to Ontario

After philosophy class on Tuesday, since I knew that my grant refund had come through, I rode to the bank machine at Dundas and University to take out $300 and then went straight to Topcuts for a haircut. The studio was busy this lunch hour and so I had to wait through one and a half stylings for Amy. I don’t have to tell her anymore how I want my hair to be cut and I like the way she does it. I think it’s because she’s a daughter, a long way from her parents in Thailand and a mother, on the verge of her own kids growing up and going away, that she always asks about my daughter while she’s cutting my hair. I told her that Astrid is learning French in Montreal, which led to us talking about learning French in general and I informed her that in 2020 we will be have the first francophone university in Ontario right here in Toronto. I said that I was glad they were building it but that it seemed strange not to build it in Sudbury, since it’s the center of the very wide region through which the largest Franco-Ontarian population is spread. Maybe they don’t think that Sudbury has the infrastructure to handle that much of an increase in population so quickly.

Now looking good, I went to have a good look for some of the books on my 20^th Century U.S. Literature reading list. I have almost all the texts that I need already on my computer but I’d rather not bother fiddling with my laptop in the classroom, so I wanted to have hard copies of each text anyway. The first place I went was Elliot’s on Yonge north of Wellesley. There I found a book of short stories by Henry James that included “The Beast in the Jungle”, a book of stories by Kate Chopin containing “The Awakening” and another of F. Scott Fitzgerald with “Babylon Revisited”. Next I went up the street to ABC Books and Magazines but they didn’t have anything I needed. I continued north to Bloor and then west to the bookstore in the building where Rochedale College used to be. They had the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but the wrong century. I stopped for a quick bite at New York Fries because I was starting to burn out. My last stop was BMV Books, which has a lot of Norton Anthologies. They don’t have the 9^th Edition, which is what we are supposed to get, but they had most of the 7^th. The problem is that this anthology is a package of several books covering different sections of the century. I settled for the short version of the 8^th edition, which doesn’t have any of the novels, but I could get those separately. It also didn’t have the Ernest Hemingway story, “Hills Like White Elephants” so I bought “The Essential Hemingway” which had it. Every bookstore I’d been before in had lots of Hemingway but not that story.

I decided I was done, having most of everything I needed, so I headed home. About three cyclists whizzed past me on the Bloor bike lane, which is a rare coincidence. On the way home I realized that I still hadn’t gotten Edith Wharton’s “Soul’s Belated”. I could have gone down to Ten Editions to look, but it takes hours to stand on ladders in that place. I decided that for Wednesday’s class I’d just print the story from my digital copy of the 6^th Edition of the short version of the Norton Anthology.
            Looking at what I had later I saw that I would also have to print Nella Larsen’s “Passing” unless I could find a hard copy somewhere. A lot of the material isn’t even in the prescribed anthology anyway and he would be posting it on Blackboard.