Forty-five years ago today, Peter Gzowski, hosting This Country in the Morning on CBC Radio, met Robertson Davies for the first time.

The interview, a transcript of which appears in Conversations with Robertson Davies, begins:

PG: I welcome now, with great pleasure, Robertson Davies, a man whom I’ve been reading for years and have not had the pleasure of meeting until this morning, and the first question I had to ask him as he arrived in the studio was “How does one address the Master of Massey College?” because my experience with that title is almost totally from the novels of C. P. Snow where people are always calling one another, or calling the master “Master,” but you don’t say that outside the college?

RD: Well no. It’s silly, I mean it implies particularly, I think, to Canadian ears, a type of superiority which I would not dream of [chuckles] assuming and it’s just that I don’t like Principal or President or Provost or whatever it was, and I was called the Master of Massey College because it was one of the few academic titles left when I got there.

Later in their conversation they are joined by the psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, from the Clarke Institute, and the topic turns to coincidence, something that lurks as a constant theme in Davies’s work:

VR: You know, I would be very stupid to reject what you say out of hand because I think that much of what you say is true, and one has after all, only got to see in one’s own life the kind of novelist’s devices at play, the coming together by accident of things that you just wouldn’t have dreamt of, and I often find myself saying to someone that coincidences are so colossal that they would be rotten in a novel.

RD: Yes, yes. Exactly.

VR: Or you know, when one is in a personal situation, and one says gawd, this is badly written because it’s so trite, because literature reflects back, and yet, I must persist with as much politeness as I can that one of the devices after all in the novel is to prevent this coincidence, coming together too neatly, appearing to resolve too quickly. Oddly enough, the novelist, and particularly a fictive account of a life, has to be much more—here I am teaching my—to put it mildly—my grandfather in all sorts of ways to suck eggs—but it would seem to me that one of the technical problems in reporting a life is in fact not to make it come out too neatly.

RD: Yes.

PG: So you can’t have reality.

VR: That’s precisely it. That in fact you know Francis Bacon, the painter, for example, when he’s finished something that looks too real, goes across and quite arbitrarily just scratches up the surface because the paradox is that reality is the enemy of that necessary enclosed world which is a work of art.

RD: Yes. I think you’re entirely right. Shakespeare says something about that in one of his plays. Someone says if this were presented upon the stage now, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction and it is true that if you want to present life as an effective sort of realistic representation of life, you must not be so daring about coincidence as fate is. But Jung wrote so interestingly about this in his theories about synchronicity, and so forth, that I have been greatly tempted to have a bash at it [Laughs].

That bash is what so drew me to Davies in my twenties, where I essentially stopped my studies and sat down to read his entire canon.

Vivian Rakoff’s son was David Rakoff, someone you might remember from This American Life.

Ira Glass memorialized the younger Rakoff, who died five years ago, at age 47, in an episode of the program produced shortly thereafter; Glass began:

One of the first times I met David Rakoff— this is before he started writing stories for the radio— he invited me to sit in the window of a department store with him. He was playing Sigmund Freud in a Christmas display window at Barney’s, and he was seeing patients in the window. David sat in a chair. I lay on a couch.

My mom was the therapist. David’s dad was a psychiatrist. We’d both been therapy patients ourselves at some point or another. And so it was easy for us to play this simulacrum of psychiatry with each other. I don’t remember what we talked about. It was so long ago. But I remember very clearly the feeling of it.

David, gently asking leading general questions like a real therapist would— how are things going? Why do you think you said that? It was easy to talk to him. And unlike the real Sigmund Freud, he offered advice. And it was surprisingly cozy.

Though one wall of the room that we were in was this plate glass window that faced Madison Avenue, the space was narrow and cocoon-like. The muffled street noise that leaked through the window made it feel more womb-like if anything. People on the street couldn’t hear what we said to each other. So it was both public and intimate. I left feeling close to him. I left wishing we could do it again.

And we did, in a way. Nearly everything he ever made for our radio show was a personal act, made in close collaboration for public consumption, performed behind a plate glass window of one kind or another. This week marks the fifth anniversary of his death. He’d been on This American Life 25 times. The first time was in 1996, just two months after we went on the air. The last was just three weeks before he died.

Also from Conversations with Robertson Davies, here Davies addresses death, speaking with Tom Harpur:

Robertson Davies: By preparation for death I don’t mean folding your hands or going around forgiving a lot of people you don’t want to forgive: it’s preparing for a richness, a good and glorious end.

Tom Harpur: But how does one prepare?

Robertson Davies: You have to come to terms with yourself and your place in the scheme of life – something a good many people don’t want to do. In the last century we have extended the normal life-span. Many seem to believe that this means we have extended the period when they should enjoy the things they enjoyed in youth. But, I don’t think they realize that we’ve also expanded the period of life when we can learn to think, feel, and experience the largeness and splendor of life.

Oliver recites the poem We are here, turning the mundane into the delightful.

On the GO Train westbound to Burlington, we passed within spitting distance of the CN Tower. With my phone in selfie mode, I angled it at 45° to the window and hoped for the best.

A photo I took of Oliver this morning during breakfast. My how he’s grown.

The Typism 2017 talk, and associated blog post, Scared Shitless: Facing fear and getting out of your comfort zone, by designer Maria Montes, is a lovingly-crafted tale. It’s funny, insightful, informative and beautifully illustrated.

In my first day in Australia I only had to accomplish two goals:
1) Do not get lost;
2) Have a coffee.

I was successful at the first one so I felt pretty good about the second task. At the English school where I enrolled, I asked about types of coffee in Australia and what they meant. I only had to memorise “small flatwhite, thanks”.

I walked in the coffee shop. There was a long line-up of people ordering take away so the longer I stood in line, the more nervous I became. Finally, my turn arrived and I said confidently “small flatmate, thanks”.

The bartender looked at me with big open eyes and shook his head. I was like “what? what’s the problem?… OK, my pronunciation is rubbish but surely he got what I said, right?! Wait… is this a coffee shop?”… I was so confused! A couple of seconds later, I realised what I said, and for the next three years I only ordered lattes although I hate latte’s foam.

I decided a few days ago that I wanted to loan a book to a friend. Things got out of hand. As it goes.

I decided that I needed an ex libris bookplate.

But why make only one; I should loan more books.

To the print shop!

Step one was to figure out a way of making my own “gummed backing” so that I could easily affix the bookplates to books simply by moistening and applying; I think I’ve cracked that. Or at least I’m getting close.

Step two was to set and print on the Golding Jobber № 8.

Fortunately, in a cache of printing ephemera that a book-making friend gifted me this spring, there was a perfect klischee: an open book laying on two other books.

I combined this with two typefaces gained from the same gift, Ultra Bodoni 14 pt. and Helvetica 18 pt., along with a couple of thin ornaments.

And then I printed up 100 on some white, unlined index cards cut it half vertically to become 3 by 2.5 inches.

The bookplates are drying now; tomorrow I’ll brew up a new batch of agar-agar and apple cider vinegar and, if everything goes according to plan, the book I set out to loan a few days ago will be in the hands of the recipient by sundown.

Summer Kitchen is a new restaurant in Charlottetown that’s moved into the space occupied for decades previous by the venerable Noodle House, which moved downtown recently.

The building has received a long-deserved clean-up and renovation; the pervasive pink has been expunged, and replaced by shades of red. The place has never looked better.

Oliver and I stopped in for lunch mid-afternoon yesterday. There being no vegetarian options evident on the menu, we asked our server for recommendations; she called the chef out to speak with us, and we took him up on his suggestion of spicy eggplant and tofu over rice.

The result was very good; indeed it may have been the first palatable version of eggplant I’ve ever been served.

They’re starting off slowly at Summer Kitchen, waiting for additional staff to arrive before they step on the accelerator. Now might be the best time for you to stop in for a meal, before it gets really popular, as I’m sure it will.

Open every day except Tuesday. Our bill was $16 for two, which included a plate of vegetarian spring rolls to start.

The Charlottetown Guardian is in the midst of a website relaunch, something I imagine comes as a result of its corporate parent changing.

One of the pages that I–and I expect many–visit every day on the newspaper’s website is the obituaries page, a page that, as of now, is showing “Oh no! Page not found” and then linking back to itself.

In the new site header there’s an “Obituaries” link that goes to this mostly-useless page that shows a seemingly-randomly-sorted collection of 4926 obits from Prince Edward Island, with no ability to see those that are recent.

It turns out that there is a page that will show you the recent deaths, it’s just not that one, it’s this one, the results of an “advanced search” of the InMemoriam.ca site for obituaries from The Guardian, in reverse chronological order.

I suspect that The Guardian will address this issue shortly, but if you want to keep up to date for the time-being, look there.