Who reads this blog?

I blogged before about the nature of this blog. This post is not supposed to be as profound as that one was (not that it was a very profound one to begin with), just an anecdotal observation.

So I have been blogging for a while, and through writing posts and commenting on other people's blog, I got the attention of various people, from very different places. I "met" people through blogging that I might never meet in the flesh, from places I never visited and might never will, yet I got their attention. On my blogroll, you have blogs from the Untied States, from Canada, from Québec and England (of course!). Among the people who commented here there were also people from the Middle East, South Africa, Scotland and I might be missing a few. It makes me feel dizzy. My readership is very modest, last time I checked I had only seventeen followers, it is a ridiculously small number. I rarely have more than two or three comments on my posts either. However, even though it is a small readership, I do get some attention (I mentioned some in the post linked above).

More recently I was surprised to discover that people got here from the blog of a certain Miss Nahar. Vraie Fiction is even on her blogroll, for some reason. I have no idea why: she never commented here, she is from Indonesia (I think) and she blogs sporadically. I commented on her blog back in January, asking how I ever got on her blogroll, but never got any answer. It is very strange: she seems to be a very religious person and me being an unbeliever, that should have put her off. If my presence on her blogroll is a mystery to me, I find it a perfect illustration of how much travelling a blog can do.

Les Shadoks

J'ai trouvé par hasard sur Youtube les épisodes d'une série animée française qui a eu un succès immense à une certaine époque: Les Shadoks de Jacques Rouxel. J'avais découvert la série il y a plus de dix ans (ça ne rajeunit personne), sous la forme d'une adaptation en bande dessinée. Le premier album avait été laissé dans le local commun des étudiants d'Études françaises (appelé à l'époque et peut-être encore aujourd'hui Le Soulier de Satin) en compagnie du premier album du Concombre Masqué. J'avais dévoré les deux (pas ltitéralement dans le cas du Concombre Masqué) et je m'étais donc servi une bonne pinte d'humour absurde, le genre d'humour le plus rare, le plus difficile à réussir, mais que je trouve le plus drôle.

L'impact culturel de la série a été aussi immense qu'insidieux. Les Shadoks ont donné à la langue française des maximes pleines de sagesse. Je redécouvre donc la série avec plaisir, dans son format original, le charme primitif de son dessin et l'humour sophistiqué de sa narration. Et je laisse ici les premiers épisodes, glanés sur Youtube:

Atmosphere

My wife and I went to La Tasca this evening, after an afternoon at the cinema watching the latest Harry Potter movie. The meal was delicious, but I left somewhat hungry. La Tasca is a Spanish restaurant specialised in tapas, which are maybe a bit small. Or I am just too greedy. That said, the mousse au chocolat was to die for.

I have never been that much into Spain or Spanish culture, I love Spain through two operas set in Seville, Carmen and Don Giovanni, the first in French, the second in Italian. However I do like the idea of tapas. It's like eating six or seven different meals at once. Eating in this particular La Tasca was quite nice, regardless of food quality/quantity. The restaurant was in an all new part of town, it had a modern furniture that did not look like a glorified canteen, there was a Spanish exoticism presence without being too tacky and the wide windows let the light of this sunny summer evening get in without leaving us blinded by it. Whatever I said about the food, the dinner certainly did not lack in atmosphere.

I take lots of pleasure in life simply by the atmosphere of some situations. It has something to do with my wild imagination, I think. Eating the same meal is very different in a rustic restaurant than a trendy one. You are experiencing something as much as eating. Sometimes you feel like you are a character in The Godfather, or some hardboiled fiction, or something of the sort. Same goes with pubs: the feeling is different when you have a beer in an old man's pub (as my wife calls them) or a modern one. I usually feel out of place in both, but I often prefer old man's pubs as it makes me feel younger. When you travel to Brocéliande, whatever happens during your trip you will be filled by the otherworldly atmosphere of the place. Some books are perfect for rainy days and I prefer to read horror stories in Autumn, especially when it is cold and dry outside (and even better when it is windy). When the last book of the Harry Potter series was released, I bought it the very night (I thought I would do it, being in England at the time and all). Summer 2007 was a very bad one, always rainy and windy, and this night was no exception: it was cool, sometimes rainy and the wind was blowing madly. It was as if the weather had decided to fit the dark tone of the novel for its release. Reading any other book of the series, I never had as much pleasure than I had reading the first few chapters of The Deathly Hallows that night. The time/timing was just perfect.

And this evening, after the meal, I spent a few minutes outside watching darkness slowly falling. Summer evenings are the best, I think, when daylights are getting dim and taking those dark orange colours, while shadows are growing around you. Summer has evenings full of atmosphere and I love them.

Writer's block?

I thought about putting some music, but I have done that very often these days and this is not a music blog, after all. And I did not want it to be an excuse to pass time when I am in the middle of a writer's block. It happens from time to time: when I was writing my thesis (solution: read a book, repeat if necessary), when I was that creative writing course ten years ago (already), and so on. That said, I usually had a deadline to overcome this (it is always the best repellent). That was the case when I was doing creative writing, and I ended up producing a pretty good short story, set in a fancy restaurant, which I blogged about before. I got to find it again, it is somewhere on a floppy disk and in writing. I got a high mark on it and used to come back to it from time to time. It wasn't easy to please academics, let alone impress them, but I managed to impress my professor, so I was really proud. I have to find it again, if only to remind me that even young and naïve, I had writing skills which I probably still have.

How did I get over writer's block then, apart from the fact that there was a deadline? I remember working on it until very late at night, even though there were classes tomorrow. I think part of the way I managed to go through it is that there was a story to be told. I had rewritten The Last Supper in a kitchen environment, with the head chef as a Christ-like figure and cocaine as the spiritual connection/ideal/thingie that was making him go on and ultimately suffer and die. My main character was a waiter who was an ambiguous Judas (as Judas should be). When I couldn't find the right words, I was just trying to get the story going, and then I could rewrite the boring passages and give the strenght they needed. Basically, I need to get some good stories to write here, and the rest will go from it.

RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Let's try to be a bit less trivial today, shall we? I am going to blog about some big piece of literature, instead of the lesser works I usually blog about. I just learned that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. His death does not come up at a surprise, as he was very old, but it is still quite sad. I read only one book of him, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but it marked me. That was a genuine masterpiece, a simple (yet so efficient in its simplicity) account of a day in a gulag. No dramatisation, however grim was the account there was nothing to cry on, the novel/novella was just the monotonous suffering of a prisoner in a repressive regime. The tone was grim, still it was deliciously ironic. The book was nott only a very efficient denunciation of Soviet Russia, it was a brilliant piece of writing. So RIP to a great, great writer. We don't have many of them left, so even at 89 of age, his departure is a great loss.

Catharsis

I'm trying to write a "deep" entry here. I was just thinking about what I am into as works of fiction and I have to admit that many of them are quite violent. Even I discovered Anthony Burgess trough his most violent work, which is A Clockwork Orange of course. I guess there was something about Alex's wild and amoral nature that appealed to the teenager I was. I don't think it's the greatest novel ever written anymore, and Burgess himself made much superior works, but I am still attracted by nasty pieces of fiction. Recently, I blogged about Fantômas, one cannot get more violent and cruel than that, unless you like to read Sade. There are others too. As a person, I don't take pleasure in violence, actually I am a bit of a wimp. But I take great pleasure in fictionalised accounts of violence. When I was studying at university, I once burst out laughing watching a shoot out between a robber and a redneck with a gun in the movie Boogie Nights, which ended up by having three guys killed in a donuts shop, including both armed men. There was blood everywhere and it was deliciously ironic. So anyway, I laughed because it was emant to make the viewer laugh and it worked. My American housemate got quite angry. She told me in a dusgusted tone "You are so sick!" I said no, that it was cathartic for me. Maybe I should have said I was pro gun control.

Anyway, I will not pretend that I know much about catharsis. I have never actually totally grasped the concept, which is not even consensual. According to this site, catharsis is "the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, esp. through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music." This is what I learned in my literature classes, this is what I taught to my students when I was teaching them Racine. But one of my teachers disagreed with the definition and said that catharsis was devoid of any moral connotation and simply meant taking pleasure in fctitious display of things that would not be pleasant in real life. As art for me is by definition not moral (one does not enjoy a work of art because it is moral but because it is aesthetic), I prefer this definition better, even though it comes from a Greek word meaning cleansing (and do read the rest of this article, as it shows how unclear meaning of the term is). Whatever catharsis exactly is, in its essence, it's manifestation can be perceived every time one watches something horrible in fiction and takes pleasure in it. Of course, to take pleasure in it, one has to distantiate fiction from reality, which is a sign of health.

A reflexion on the nature of Vraie Fiction

For a start, I will quote Anthony Burgess (in the first book of his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God):

"The delineation of oneself at such length must look like egocentricity, but an autobiography has to be egocentric. On the other hand, what do we mean by the ego? It is an existential concept, I believe, and the ego I examine is multiple and somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining."

I recently did an entry (in French) about the nature of this blog. It was bound to happen, as I don't feel always very inspired to write about my uneventful life (the heat, the heat of this Summer just turns me numb), so self-analysis was the way to go. I want to freely rewrite in English this entry here, as my life is still uneventful and I am a bit of an egocentric.

On the 25th February 2008, I started this blog. Strange thing a blog, I learned that quickly. First no one knows who will end up reading it, and quite often you end up writing to yourself. it is a form of personal journal or autobiography, something that will interest nobody, or just a few people. I started to blog wanting to tell the story of an experience that I considered (and am still considering ) of interest: the life of a Quebec expat in England. I had no idea what I was going to write about or if I was going to be able to sustain this blog. It seems that I managed to write quite a lot, about practically anything, and if I sure don't have much of a readership, I at least gave the virtual world something to read. Then again, I did get some readers. My rant against Christian fundamentalists gave me a bit of exposure, my entries on Paul McCartney got the attention of a troll and a couple of random entries got visited quite often. That said, I didn't create this blog to start and take part in controversies. My main intention was to write about myself...sort of. I say sort of, because my life in itself, as lived, is not very interesting. That said, once told, through the exercise of rewriting, when the meaningless has been taken off, when the boring stuff has been excised or transformed by the account/writing, it can be of some interest. There is no such thing as a truthful autobiography, that genuinely says what happened, how it happened, exactly . All autobiography is fiction, because the memory of the writer is faulty, because he twists a few things to make a better story, because he interprets his life, because he reconstructs the events to give them significance. In effect, this is what I am doing here on this blog. So I gave it the name "Vraie Fiction" as it is not reality, yet it is a genuine account of fragments of my life, fragments that I made meaningful. Anyway, that's what I tried to do, that's what I managed to do between entries about beer, food and weather.

I also tried to make this blog about fiction itself. As I studied literature, it keeps me connected with my studies, and I think I can make people discover or rediscover works such as the Fantômas stories, Nero Wolfe or the TV series Omertà. Because it promotes works that deserve to be better known and because it is fun to write about such things, I want to keep this aspect.

Okay, enough about the egocentric and pseudo-philosophical observations, let's try to write about something more concrete next time.

De la nature de Vraie Fiction

Ce blogue semble pris de torpeur estivale ces temps-ci: la chaleur de l'été me donne peu d'inspiration et quand j'en ai, le billet passe inaperçu, alors que des trucs que j'écris à moitié pour faire du remplissage se trouvent très populaires. Prenons par exemple le billet sur Ursula Andress, dont je suis assez fier. C'est je crois un bon petit exercice d'analyse. Alors que les billets sur Paul McCartney m'ont valu une petite controverse maison (la maison étant le blogue) et les attaques obsessives d'un troll. Les récents billets et les réactions qu'ils ont suscitées (ou qu'ils n'ont pas suscitées) m'ont poussé à réfléchir sur la nature de ce blogue.

Étrange phénomène que le blogue, je le découvre petit à petit. L'un de mes billets les plus populaires ces temps-ci est celui sur Christopher Eccleston qui jouera Destro, notamment à cause des images qui attirent bien du monde, même si elles n'ont rien de spécial. Mes billets sur la série Rome ont été très populaires, mais n'attirent aucuns commentaires. Mes billets sur Nadine Dorries m'ont valu une certaine popularité il n'y a pas si longtemps. Cela dit, je n'avais pas l'intention au départ de faire un blogue polémiste. Je tenais aussi à y parler d'autre chose que de nourriture, ce qui m'est arrivé plus souvent qu'autrement. Je tenais à faire une sorte de journal impersonnel d'une expérience en soi porteuse d'anecdotes intéressantes (la vie d'un étranger en Angleterre), la nature fictive de ces expériences résidant dans la mise en récit: toute histoire racontée est forcément fictive, même autobiographique. Écrire son histoire, raconter un évènement cocasse ou un voyage, c'est forcément donner sa version partielle et partiale de la réalité. C'est aussi la modifier plus ou moins substantiellement pour faire une meilleure histoire. Je ne sais pas si mon enfance s'est produite exactement comme je l'ai racontée dans mes billets nostalgiques, mais l'impression que j'en ai y est authentiquement racontée. Et le récit est plus intéressant que l'expérience, ne serait-ce parce que je vous épargne les longueurs.

Alors voilà ce qu'était Vraie Fiction au départ: une mise en fiction de l'expérience d'un expatrié. Ce l'est toujours. Que ça puisse intéresser autre chose que moi-même et des proches, ça fera l'affaire d'un autre billet (sans doute). Ce que Vraie Fiction est aussi devenue, c'est un blogue qui parle de fiction, peu importe sa forme, mais notamment fiction littéraire. Cela vient un peu de ma formation de mes études en littérature, mais je ne tiens pas ici à faire des analyses formelles de quoi que ce soit. Cela dit, peu de gens s'intéressent à mes réflexions sur la fiction, notamment (je le présume) parce qu'il y a des blogues qui existent exclusivement pour ça. Mais c'est une qualité pour ainsi dire naturelle de ce bloque, que je tiens à garder, surtout qu'elle permet de faire la promotion d'oeuvres parfois trop peu connues.

Après ce billet, je crois que l'inspiration m'est revenue.

I love Queen & Country...

...and I am not talking about the monarch, as you probably know. I am taling about the excellent series of Greg Rucka. I read the second volume of the Declassified series yesterday. Great stuff. What I especially liked about it is the moral ambiguity Rucka puts: his heroes defend a cause they don't always understand. The enemy does not always have a point (he had a point in this particular volume though), but truth and justice cannot be an absolute concept in the world of espionnage.

Juin est arrivé

C'est le premier jour de juin et ça a vraiment l'air d'un mois de juin! Pour moi, le mois de juin signifie le retour de l'été (je fais commencer l'été avant le 21, qui est une date arbitraire de toute manière) Je vous donne une couverture de Detective Tales pour souligner le 1er juin. Elle date de juin 1937 et elle a tous les ingrédients pour une couverture dramatique: violence, méchants cruels, une femme en danger, un héros et une héroïne, un brin d'exotisme, de la torture, etc. À en juger par les vêtements des protagonistes, l'action ne se passe pas en Alaska, alors ça a un côté estival qui sied bien...au 1er juin.

Queen and Country

No, I am not talking about the Queen of England. I cannot care less about her. I am talking about the excellent series of graphic novels and books written by Greg Rucka, set in the world of espionnage. The series tells the story of MI6 operative Tara Chace. It's quality stuff. Why is it so good? Well, everything, really. Unlike other espionnage series, it's realistic, unglamorous and down to earth. It is unique in the genre, as it manages to be both believable and fascinating. The characters deal with what real spies deal with: terrorists, Russian maffias and kleptocracies, but also a heavy bureaucracy, politicians with their own agenda and conflictual relationships between different intelligence services (one of the most interesting aspect of the series). Rucka is wonderful as inventing genuine characters, mixing their everyday life with the unique environment they work in. For an American, he is also very good as describing England (and, through the MI6/CIA reports, the love-hate relationship Brits have with Americans), even though sometimes American terms and expression oddly show up in the vocabulary of British characters. I have been reading the series since 2003 and it's utterly addictive. I bought the second volume of the Declassified series yesterday in London. I might start reading it tonight. I would seriously recomment that you get your hand on the first volume and start reading it. You'll get hooked.

Cate Blanchett

Just got back from watching Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was not impressed. It seemed to be like a bunch of recycled action scenes with a sci-fi oriented plot that did not fit the genre. I thought Indiana Jones was all about mysticism/religious themes. The nuclear bomb was rgatuitious and out of place. That said, there were some good ideas: the Cold War era with the paranoia in the US (reminiscent of our own time?), the Soviets as the badguys and the acknowledgement that Indiana Jones has aged. And what about the casting. Flawless, but they deserved a better script. But can Cate Blanchett play bad? She is always fabulous. I will watch something better of her, to see what she is really capable of. I know how good she is, but it's always a pleasure to watch.

Dinosaurs are boring

There are two sci-fi adventure movies with dinosaurs this late morning on tv, one is The Lost World, based on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel (which I want to read) and The Land That Time Forgot, based on an Edgar Rice Burrough story (Burrough is of course the father of Tarzan). I am flicking through both of them. I should enjoy both, I used to absolutely love silly sci-fi adventure stories about lost worlds with dodgy special effects, but so far I am bored. The Lost World has lizards with fake horns in front of a blus creen posing as dinosaurs! And it is set in the 60s! Boring. I thought dinosaurs fighing humans would be really cool. Well, so far I am not even enjoying the silliness. Shame. in The Land That Time Forgot, you can see the wires on very still the pterodactyles. I remember watching its sequel, The People That Time Forgot, when I was a child. I tought then that it was very entertaining.

I have a vague memory of The Warlords of Atlantis, which I want to see again. From what I can remember, it was quite ridiculous but enjoyable. I think I need a bit of escapism.

Last Supper

We are watching Real Hell's Kitchen at the moment, a documentary about the stress that goes with the restaurant industry, sometimes leading to alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. I used to be a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant when I was a student, I remmeber how stressful it could be, especially since I was the lowest form of life in the kitchen (but the pressure on the others was tremendous too). It inspired me so much that I wrote a short story about it in a creative writing course during my undergraduate studies, rewriting the account of Last Supper through the lives of a kitchen staff, where the head chef/Christ was dying of a cocaine overdose. It was very appreciated. I might "publish" it here one day.

Verra-t-on Omertà à nouveau au Québec?

Comme certains d'entre vous le savent, je suis un grand fan de séries policières, et d'une en particulier qui a transformé radicalement la télévision au Québec: Omertà: La Loi du Silence, écrite par Luc Dionne et réalisée (pour les deux premiers volets) par Pierre Houle.

Petit retour nostalgique aux années 90... À l'époque, la télé québécoise carburait aux téléromans et aux téléséries plus lourdes signées Réjean Tremblay (ou l'un de ses imitateurs), qui étaient en fait des soaps à gros budgets, situés dand des milieux professionnels précis: le hockey (Lance et Compte) ou le journalisme (Scoop). C'était écrit avec un très gros stylo, les intrigues mélangeaient situations invraisemblables et intrigues sexuelles gratuites (Réjean Tremblay n'a jamais eu de talent pour l'écriture, alors il compensait en cherchant à mettre à nu toutes les actrices un peu jolies du Québec). Il y avait aussi des séries historiques qui se passaient la plupart du temps au XIXe siècle au Québec, qui étaient parfois excellentes (Les Filles de Caleb ont fait histoire), souvent médiocres (Les Filles de Caleb ont fait hélas beaucoup de clones). Puis, autour de 1995-1996, apparurent une grappe de séries situées dans le milieu policier: Jasmine (à TVA), 10-07 (à TQS) et enfin Omertà (à Radio-Canada). Jasmine était un clone de la formule Réjean Tremblay: l'histoire d'une policière métisse à Montréal, confrontée au racisme de ses collègues et la méfiance de sa communauté, avec beaucoup de temps passé dans le vestiaire des policières. 10-07 était une banale histoire de tueur en séries comme on pouvait en voir partout ailleurs. Puis, en janvier 1996, vint Omertà. Au départ, on aurait pu croire à une autre imitation de la formule Tremblay: milieu professionnel précis (la police), triangles amoureux, etc. Mais Omertà s'est avérée, pour moi et beaucoup de téléspectateurs, une épiphanie télévisuelle. L'histoire évoluait autour de l'Escouade du crime organisé de la SN (la Sûreté Nationale, en fait la SQ rebaptisée), qui essayait de capturer Giuseppe Scarfo, le chef de la maffia montréalaise. Deux policiers partageaient la vedette de la série: Pierre Gauthier, l'enquêteur principal, et François Pelletier, agent-double. Pour compliquer les choses, la nouvelle flamme de Gauthier s'avérait être la fille de Scarfo et Pelletier tentait de protéger son ex, ancienne policière devenue héroïnomane et prostituée, tout en essayant de garder sa couverture. Bien que l'intrigue avait quelques invraisemblances, elle parvenait à garder un semblant de plausibilité, notamment à cause de l'authenticité du travail des policiers, décrit avec minutie et réalisme. Omertà a amené beaucoup à la télé québécoise: une violence assumée (les protagonistes n'étaient pas des anges), un Montréal authentique, une musique jazzée, signée Michel Cusson, qui donnait le ton et créait une atmosphère incomparable, une distribution qui mélangeait visages connus (Michel Côté, Germain Houde, Michel Dumont, Claude Blanchard, Micheline Lanctôt) et inconnus (Luc Picard, Brigitte Paquette, Dino Tavarone), une intrigue qui nous amenait de façon plausible aux milieux de la haute finance aux coins glauques de Montréal, remplis de junkies et de prostituées, une description du crime organisé à saveur québécoise. Omertà était sombre, brut, familier dans son décor mais dépaysant dans son exécution et ses protagonistes.

Tout ça pour vous dire que j'ai été enthousiasmé d'apprendre que Dionne travaillait sur une quatrième série, mais dépité par de savoir que son développement était bloqué pour cause de problèmes de droits. J'espère que ça va se régler. Parce que j'en veux plus, parce que la télé au Québec en a besoin.

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For the English-speakers among you (probably the biggest part of my readership), I will write an entry about the same topic, because it is worth it.