This place could use some sprucing, it's true. You might be interested to learn that one of my chapters unexpectedly gave birth to another chapter (mazel tov!), and so instead of one 40 page chapter I'm now writing two chapters of about 30 pages, due the 7th and the 12th of November respectively. Between that, teaching, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, there's just no time for extra-academic endeavors.
My NYU flâneur blog is awesome though.
Classes begin tomorrow and I've spent the whole weekend prepping my lessons for the next two weeks. It's been nothing but Gilgamesh and Genesis for my Cultural Foundations class, and Simmel and Baudelaire for my Paris class. Non-stop flânerie, all without leaving my spot on the couch.
If you're interested in flâner-ing along with us this semester, I encourage you again to follow the class blog I've set up; between my teaching and dissertation deadlines I doubt I'll be doing much here at Maîtresse. I'll be back in this space eventually, but things will no doubt be a bit quiet here for awhile.
Meanwhile, please enjoy the Arcades Project Project and here, have some Poe.
I'm teaching a class called "Paris in French and Expatriate Literature" at NYU this semester, and I've built a blog for it, where students will post their response papers and I can leave them bits of interesting information.
Check it out and let me know what you think; your input, my esteemed readers, would be invaluable! If you have any ideas as to what I ought to include on the site to enhance my students' experience of the course, please do let me know.
The idea is to look at the figure of the flâneur, and more generally at movement and/in the city; we're reading Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, Aragon, Breton, Mirrlees, Hemingway, Rhys, Baldwin, Debord, and Guène. I'll have the syllabus up on the site soon, as soon as it's taken its final form.
Mille mercis!
This is kind of embarrassing but is so cool I couldn't not mention it. Along with five other Parisian bloggers (including Naughty Paris diva Heather Stimmler-Hall), I was featured in an article in the March issue of Marie Claire Italy. The photographer, the lovely Guia Besana, came to my apartment to shoot me reading, writing, and looking pensively out of the window, and then we went to Shakespeare & Co, where the below shot was taken. You can download the full article here. Hope your Italian is in better shape than mine!
If you're a fan of the translation blog Three Percent, as I am, you might be interested to read the profile Publishers's Weekly ran on him back in October. After an extended career at Dalkey Archive Press (beloved by me; beloved by you?) Post started up Open Letters Press, a publishing house entirely dedicated to international literature in translation, with a mandate to “increase access to world literature for English readers.” And Three Percent, the official blog of the organization, got its name because only 3% of books published in the US are works in translation. What a shame! And what an embarrassment. But if Post has his way, he'll eventually have to change the title of the blog.
If you're feeling a little out of the translation loop (and who doesn't?), here is their longlist of Best Translations of 2008. And unlike some "best of" lists, it's not only comprised of books you've already heard of ten thousand times. Although yes, 2666 is on there. And here's their list, so far, of books they're releasing in 2009. The Elsa Morante sounds particularly intriguing.
Some cool news recently– Scott Esposito over at Conversational Reading heard from Sophie Lewis who heard from Christophe Claro that Mathias Enard's Zone (the novel that is entirely comprised of one long sentence) was the "novel of the decade" in France. (Pay attention, kids: This is how literary buzz is built) So Open Letter went "really?" and found the rights were still available and acquired it. Look for a translation in summer 2010 by the most-in-demand translator from French of the moment, Charlotte Mandell.
Quick and dirty today.
Michael Dirda has a nice long review of Mrs. Woolf and the Servants in the Washington Post.
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Roger Kimball on beauty and beatitude in art. (Via AL Daily)
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ReadySteadyBook has a really good interview with Lee Rourke.
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Charlotte Mandell, translator of Proust, Blanchot, and BHL, is interviewed here. (Via Three Percent)
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Don't miss Stephen Michelmore's breakdown of (lit)blogs.
I meant to mention this sooner, but it slipped my mind– a couple of weeks ago, Six Apart's newest endeavor, a list-based guide to the internet's best blogs, appropriately called Blogs.com, ran a list I contributed on the best blogs about Paris. Here it is. Enjoy! (And yes I know it's strange the subcategory is "Home & Garden," but it would seem they lack a "Travel" category, much less a "Pretentious Expats" category. They don't have a category for books, either, so I guess we should be content they made room for us in H&G!)
We’re proud to announce the newest addition to Hitotoki’s narrative map of the world: Paris.
What
other city has been as written about and mythologized as Paris? And
yet, how often does the myth reflect the reality? Take it from us: not
very often. In Paris, the reality is so much better than the myth, and
we hope Hitotoki Paris captures something of the vital spirit of the
place– its cheek, its attitude, its poise, its mystery, its
diversity– by putting you right there in the moment, in a particular
place in Paris where something unique and personal is happening.
Roland Barthes develops the theory of the punctum in his book on photography, Camera Lucida. While the studium
is the general field of a photograph (the subject matter, the thing
that may interest you or attract you to the photograph), the punctum is
the detail that interrupts the scene, the “accidental spark that
reveals the ‘here and now’ of the photograph.”* “[P]iqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure—et aussi coup de dés.”** It is a rupture, a break. The punctum changes everything.
The studium, in this case, is Paris, or the particular setting of a
Hitotoki. The punctum is that telling detail that yokes together the
writer and this moment in this place in Paris. That turning point, that
point of no return, that crystalline moment that could not occur
anywhere else– that’s a hitotoki.
Many thanks to those who contributed stories, photos, and
illustrations– please send us more. And to those of you who are just
sitting on your submissions, or who have been meaning to sit down and
write one for us– what are you waiting for? Send it in!
*Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography.
**”Sting, speck, cut, little hole– and also a cast of the dice.” Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Well shite, here I am blogging about real estate when I should be gathering links– it’s Tuesday! You see, yesterday was a holiday– Ocean Day, to be precise– so today feels like Monday. But it’s not.
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The French amended their constitution yesterday to include a 2-term limit for the President as well as a State of the Union address (The New York Times has the details). As you might expect, the Socialists went ape shit. I’ve spent the morning reading Libération, Le Monde, and Google News, trying to figure out what exactly it is about the reforms that the Socialists find so antithetic to their cause, and I have come up empty-handed. To the best of my knowledge, they opposed these reforms because they were introduced by the UMP, not because there’s anything wrong with term limits.
I’m pretty much on the fence when it comes to French politics– don’t love the right or the left– but the current group of Socialists are a joke. In some respects the Sarkozy administration is evil incarnate– but these recent reforms seem pretty harmless to this observer. My verdict: a gallic shrug.
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Back in my Sorbonne days, you could often find me working at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (sometimes alongside my students from Nanterre, which was embarrassing). One of the major drawbacks of the BSG–also a boon for serious research– was the total absence of internet connections. No Wifi and only a couple of computer terminals that were always being used by someone else. The time warp effected by the former convent-turned library was implacable.
Until now. The Sorbonne’s Hygiene Committee (I kid you not, it’s actually called Le comité hygiène et sécurité de la Sorbonne) is plugging in a couple of Wifi routers, which were installed in May but “unplugged” when a librarian complained of “violent symptoms” of radiation poisoning. The director of the library commissioned a study of the radiation waves in the library, and found them to be 135 times below the maximum legal threshold. So they want to turn the Wifi back on– which means the unions are getting their panties in a twist. Come September, the unions may prove more of an impediment to studying than email access. [Via LivresHebdo]
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Twizon is the lovechild of Amazon and Twitter. Can someone explain the point of it to me? [Via LaFeuille.]
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And Mark Sarvas wins the award for “Most Salacious Post Title for a Literary Blog.”
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Tori Amos. Comic Book Tattoo. Now, more than just a song lyric.
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I’ve still only dipped a toe into the Murakami waters. But whether you’ve read all or none of his work, here, from the Times (of London) are the top ten things you need to know about this writer.
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If you don’t read Café Mode, you should.* Géraldine is just back from the Rencontres photo festival at Arles, and was kind enough to share some of the highlights of the expositions (including the above photographs of the legendary courtesan Cora Pearl, from the expo Les Insoumises).
*I feel like I can’t mention Géraldine’s blog without referring you to Garance’s.
psst. Japan-related blogging and various irrelevant ephemera can henceforth be found here.