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October 28, 2009

I've been having weird, weird, weird dreams. "Aren't they all?", you'd say. I know, I know. But mine are usually very frivolous and I wake up annoyed at myself for losing REM time with things such as Carla Bruni turning out to be Juliette Binoche wearing a wig. Yet, lately, I've been having dreams that sound like Umberto Eco plots. The best of them all was one where I was sitting in a dusty library reading manuscripts and I had made a fantastic discovery regarding John Chrysostom and cartography. Whatever the discovery was, it was so exciting that I woke up, convinced it was real and that I should get up and write it down. I didn't, so I have no idea what it was.

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October 26, 2009

Huh?

Can anybody explain to me why is that the french trailer for the new Zemeckis animation movie boasts "Jim Carrey est Scrooge" when the movie is dubbed in french (presumably not by Jim Carrey, says I)?

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October 22, 2009

Fall out

The letter was suprisingly rather informal and asked her why hadn't she responded to the previous ones. It finally said "Take a look at the last New Yorker you received. How would you live without it?"

"Just fine", she said while she unfolded the Times Literary Supplement which was also in the mailbox.

(and to compensate for the lack of the odd Sempé cover, I'll buy a couple of the Phaidon albums)

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The education of an american

Walking by the British Library, I point at a poster with a Marie Curie quotation: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

C: That's a good one.
R: Didn't she die of radiation poisoning?

To think I am supposedly the cynical european in this couple.

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October 14, 2009

Catching up

I've been so neglectful of this blog and I blame Twitter and Facebook. And my laziness. It's so much easier to write a sentence and click enter. And then one fine day I'm trying to remember the name of an author or of a book that I've read, I google my own blog to find it and realize why I do this after all. It is public which means that at least I have to write complete sentences rather than jotting down some notes but, in the end, it's my own diary without the naughty bits.

******

I've been thinking that this obsession with cooking and chefs has to be related with that endangered species: the housewife. There was a time you'd learn how to cook with your grandmother or great aunt; they'd teach you the little tricks for the perfect steamed rice or how to skin a garlic clove in 1/2 a second. And they probably didn't even attend school. Now, you trust that some man (in most cases) knows all about that arcane science of cooking. It's a bit like all those books about child rearing. Everybody has been doing it for ages and humanity isn't, on average, getting any cleverer or less screwed up. So it is with cooking. There's no mystery.

*****

Just as the Queen does, I moved my birthday to the following Saturday because of a sore throat acquired while visiting the fatherland. Yet, I couldn't miss going to the LRB's 30th anniversary party/book sale that coincided with my own birthday. Got meself the new Max Weber biography.

*****

Also at the LRB, I attended a talk by John Bainville and John Gray about Simenon. It was entertaining in the way that listening in on a conversation by literate people around a table is but they couldn't claim to be experts in any case. The highlight of the evening was when during Q&A a Drunken-Zizek-on-a-bad-personal-hygiene-day-lookalike asked if Simenon wore a mustache or a beard because if he had slept with 3000 women he HAD to sport a beard since that's what women prefer. A reminder: Zizek has a beard and so did his lookalike.

*****

We went on a adventure of epic proportions to Paris. Which means a family trip involving 3 people over 60 and a 59 year old. They all behaved really well, got along well and were very un-fussy and would have been happy to have been fed sweet crêpes all day.

Mom in a Toulouse-Lautrec background at the Musée d'Orsay

*****

I need to get a book on Caillebotte. I don't think I was aware of the existence of this painting at the Orsay and, on entering the gallery, I was attracted to it as if it were a claudia-magnet.

*****

I finally read "The Maltese Falcon". I was shocked: Spade is described as having pale brown hair. Hammett didn't have the prescience to imagine that Bogey would be the perfect Spade. All tough guys are dark skinned and dark haired. Everybody knows that.

*****

Sociologist David Riesman's 50's book "The Lonely Crowd" summarized in one sentence: "Most people don't know what they want from life until their neighbor gets it".

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