jZepp

Autumn Beauty

by Obachan

Sunset

Just in case you havent seen this on spittoonextra - shame on you - a snap taken through the window right in front of me; leaning over the monitors and wide desk, without spilling the coffee...

A dramatic range of colours.

[Andrew Barrow taken with a Canon EOS350D on auto landscape settings]

Young Saturniid

Saturniid

Paris Artists' Ateliers

In "la Miroiterie", a collective artist studio in Menilmontant

There is something you should not miss if you are interested in Art and stay in Paris at this time of the year . Every year at the end of summer , a group of artists working in the Menilmontant neighbourhood organizes three days of "portes ouvertes" (open doors) with visitors welcomed in the ateliers, to see the works , the places , and chat with the artists . The event is very well planned, with massive printing of a detailed map of the neighbourhood with exact locations of the studios . The event takes place in the vicinity of Menilmontant street , in the 20th arrondissenent, a district wich still retains today its popular parisian touch and was immortalized through famous photographers works like the ones by Willy Ronis . Even today, when you walk across this part of Paris , you can often feel the ghosts of this bygone era, wich most of us know only through the photographs .

Frederick Holmes, who is from New York

The first artist I spoke to was Frederick Holmes . It was at "la Miroiterie" a defunct mirror factory transformed into a collection of ateliers . I was taking pictures and we talked together , that's when I asked where he was from . He was leaving soon for a few days in N.Y. before coming back here .
I love these "portes ouvertes" because you can not only speak with artists, but also visualize living and working spaces in the back alleys of this old Paris neighbourhood that you can't even imagine  when you walk in the street . And it is quite refreshing to look at the decors and  the details in the different studios ( the view on the right was taken in another studio a few blocks away ).

Killer B's

(Editor's note -- this article is intended for those with little/no knowledge of the Piedmont's big reds)

Brrr.  This morning I took the pooch out to pee and noticed frost on the ground.  It seems winter is trying to infringe on autumn - my favorite time of year.  Why do I adore fall?  For some primitive reason, when the weather cools and leaves begin to yellow, I crave roasted foods.  With apologies to my vegetarian friends, I heartily crave slow roasted meat.  In addition to roasted culinary delights, autumn unleashes my passion for brooding, gnarly red wine.  As I happily strut around in my favorite fall sweater, I scoff at the silly little reds in my wine cabinet.  I want red wine with structure and attitude.  Thankfully northwestern Italians share my passion for red wine in autumn.  This region of Italy is called the Piedmont and its bold red wines are killer (in the colloquial sense).  And it just so happens that they all begin with the letter, “B”: Barbera, Barbaresco, and Barolo.

The Chopstick Chronicles: Drying Noodles

Thin noodles are one of the specialties of Jinmen, a Taiwan island which lies just off the coast of China. Jinmen (golden gate) is better known to history buffs as Quemoy These thin noodles are stir fried or served in soups. The best known dish is probably oyster noodle soup. Jinmen is also Taiwan's major producer of kaoliang (sorghum) liquor.

Ominous

"Ominous"

Reading: Karin Fossum, Juris Jurjevics and Minette Walters

By sandy

Last night, thankfully with no rain this time, I headed back down to Harbourfront for another reading at the International Festial of Authors. Like the previous night's reading by Julian Barnes et al, this was held at the Premiere Dance Theatre in order to accommodate the larger crowd there to see Minette Walters, one of Britain's most popular crime fiction writers. Our host, Andrew Kaufman (I don't know of him, and Googling finds mostly the dead comedian of the same name, so I assume that this is the right Andrew Kaufman) pointed out during his introduction that it was a night of criminal minds: all three authors were reading from their crime novels. I don't read a lot of crime novels, but after hearing some of the readings last night, I might decide to give them a go.

First up was Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer who shunned the lectern and settled herself in one of the armchairs on stage (which I thought were there just for show). She read awkwardly from the English translation of her new book Calling Out For You, her thick accent tussling with some of the words as she read to us about a man visiting India from Norway in search of a bride, but somehow her struggle with the language made the story more riveting as the audience hung on every word. This is the latest installment in her series of crime novels featuring Inspector Konrad Sejer, translated into 16 languages and popular around the world. Like parts of Canada, Norway (the only Nordic country that I have not visited) has winters with long nights, perfect for sitting by the fire and reading a juicy murder story.

Juris Jurjevics was next: an American who was born in Latvia but grew up in New York, fought in Vietnam and founded Soho Press. Jurjevics started with some very funny comments -- he obviously knows how to work a crowd -- then read a chilling (in more ways than one) excerpt from The Trudeau Vector about a scientist in the Arctic killing himself by wandering off and stripping himself naked.

The last reading was by Minette Walters, undoubtedly the big draw for the evening, reading from The Devil's Feather. She gave quite a short reading, just the first chapter of the book, but it set up an interesting premise that made me want to read more: a serial killer who bludgeons women to death travelling around the world and using the chaos of war zones to cover up his murders. The book opens in Sierra Leone, and moves on to Baghdad later in the book. She was then joined on stage by local author Patricia Pearson, who interviewed her, or at least attempted it: Walters needed little prompting to regale us with both information on the book and tales of her past.

Two very interesting stories came out of the conversation between Walters and Pearson: first, that Walters had visited Sierra Leone on the invitation of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) after donating the prize money that she received when she won the Golden Dagger award in 1994 for The Scold's Bridle (she kept the dagger). She felt that it was the experience of a lifetime, although she was unable to get insurance coverage from anyone for the visit, and it led directly to her locating her current book there -- the first of her books with an international location. I found this particularly interesting because I have a friend who occasionally heads off for year-long jaunts as an MSF logistician, and just left a few weeks ago for Darfur in Sudan: a place that is likely as dangerous now as Sierra Leone was during Walters' trip.

The other interesting story came out when Pearson commented that Walters' first book, The Ice House, wasn't published until she was 42 years old, giving those of us over 40 a bit of inspiration for new ventures. Every source that I've ever read about Walters -- Wikipedia, publishers' websites, even Walters' own website -- refers to The Ice House as her first book, but in fact she has a dark secret in her past: for eight years when she was working as a sub-editor of romantic fiction at a magazine publisher after her graduation from university, she wrote romance novels under ten different pseudonyms. She entertained us with stories of the severe restrictions on the content of these novels imposed by the publisher (no words with double meanings, requiring one author to write an entire romance novel about tennis players without using the word "balls"), but steadfastly refused to divulge the names of her alter egos.

Reading: David Baddiel, Michael Crummey and Julian Barnes

By sandy

My evening last night had strange parallels with Answer Girl's: rainy but literary. The International Festival of Authors continues in Toronto, and I braved the cold and wet fall weather to attend a reading (one of five that went on yesterday) by David Baddiel and Julian Barnes from the U.K. and Canadian Michael Crummey at the Premiere Dance Theatre. They didn't dance, but boy, did they read, to an audience of about 250.

The event was hosted by U.K. author C.C. Humphreys (who will be participating in a round table discussion tomorrow night), who introduced each author before his reading, although there was no interview such as what I experienced at Sunday's reading. Each reading lasted 20-25 minutes, with a break after the first two to allow for people to buy books and have them signed by the authors. I hadn't noticed this at Sunday's reading since I only spent a few minutes in the book stalls before fleeing the crowds, but they were selling some of the books (the ones from tonight's authors, which I had considered buying on the spot) at inflated prices: I saw a price of $22.50 stated for one of Michael Crummey's books that had an original price printed on the cover of $21. I can understand that someone would probably pay the inflated price if they wanted to stand in line and have the author sign the book after the reading, but it seems like the festival (or whoever was running the book stalls) is taking unfair advantage of a captive audience.

Enough griping, on with the readings. David Baddiel, also well known as a comedian and co-author of the popular football anthem "Three Lions" from 1996, has taken a detour into the dramatic with his latest book The Secret Purposes. It's about the internment of refugees (many of them Jewish) by Britain on the Isle of Man during World War II, causing the separation of one particular couple: him detained on the Isle of Man, and her in Cambridge with their baby. The portion of the book that he read, which included some very funny writing in spite of the serious subject, didn't address the estranged couple, but focused on a conversation between a translator and a high-level director at the U.K. Ministry of Information during the war. Although the scenario is fictional, the crux of the conversation is an actual memo that was distributed within the M of I during that time, and can apparently be seen at the Museum of War in London. Basically, the memo stated that descriptions of the horrors (particularly the concentration camps) that were starting to emerge from Europe should be toned down before being released for general consumption, unless the targets of the atrocities were "indisputably innocent", and "not violent criminals or Jews". I found this particularly interesting because a few hours before the reading, I had read the Economist's obituary of Simon Wiesenthal (paid subscription required for link) which described Wiesenthal's dedication to ensuring that future generations knew about the Holocaust.

Next up was Michael Crummey, a poet and former finalist for the Giller Prize, reading from The Wreckage. Like Baddiel's book, it's set during the second world war, and it also tells about a couple separated by wartime events: him in a Japanese POW camp, and her in Newfoundland awaiting his return. He read three sections, two about the couple, and the last a flashback from a Japanese prison guard to his boyhood in British Columbia, which reminded me of the shameful behaviour of Canadians towards Japanese-Canadians before and during the war. I enjoyed watching and listening to Crummey read: he looked about 12 years old, but read a passage about oral sex; and he read his prose with the cadence of poetry, each sentence distinct. He's from Newfoundland, and I was surprised to hear that he has no discernible "Newf" accent, although there was a touch of it when reading the dialogue of the characters from the book. Crummey's also taking part in a round table event tonight on “The Writer’s Life in the Information Age”, along with Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Neil Bissoondath, Alison Pick and Christopher Wilson, moderated by Lewis DeSoto.

I haven't read anything of Julian Barnes’ since A History of the World In 10 1/2 Chapters; last night, he was reading from his new novel, Arthur & George. The eponymous Arthur is Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, although this book is a fictionalized account of some events in his life. Some story lines carried from real life, such as his tubercular wife and their travels to exotic warm places to ease her: the character mused about golfing near Meno House -- funny coincidence, since I lunched one day six years ago at that same Meno House in Giza, outside Cairo, looking at the pyramids while I ate. A three-time contender for the Booker Prize, Barnes was clearly the big draw for last night's reading, and likely the reason that it was held in the 450-seat Premiere Dance Theatre rather than one of the smaller venues around Harbourfront. He's in another IFOA event tonight, being interviewed by Martin Levin, if you want to catch him before he leaves the country.

The really fun thing about going to these readings is the other audience members: readings draw a diverse and sometimes weird lot, and it's easy to strike up conversations with the people around you before the lights go down. The youngish couple (well, younger than me) on my left were huge Julian Barnes fans, and had come just to hear him read although they appeared to enjoy the other readers. They seemed to have read all of his books, judging by the way that they quizzed me about various titles, and she admitted to having read one of her favourites five times. They even knew an interesting bit of trivia: Barnes had an uncredited cameo role as himself in the movie Bridget Jones' Diary.

On my right was an older man who confided that he never thought that when he retired, he could spend more than his pension amount on books in a week. Like me, he's attending several readings this week, and he was toting an armload of books. His real concern, however, was that he had brought two of the books in with him rather than purchasing them there (as many people do at these events), and he thought that the booksellers might think that he had nicked them from the stands since they weren't in a bag! I assured him that he wasn't the only one carrying in his own books, and to go ahead and get in there for an autograph.

The fun continued on the way home: I hopped on a streetcar for the short ride, and was joined by several people who had obviously attended one of the readings at Harbourfront that evening. Two women who had just met at the streetcar stop were having a lengthy discussion about authors several blocks later when I hopped off. Literature can be so contagious!

Albert, revisited

By sandy

I just noticed Andrew's great pictures of the Albert Monument in an earlier post, and wanted to add one of my own. This was taken in 2001, and I didn't notice the other-worldly cloud formations behind the monument until after I uploaded the photos.

Beau, in a further response to your questions on Andrew's post, Queen Victoria apparently became deeply depressed after Albert's death, which likely led her to eventually have this monument constructed to his memory. Her depression is the subject of the wonderful (although fictionalized) movie "Mrs. Brown", starring Judi Dench and Billy Connelly.

There's also a weird and apocryphal story that the Prince Albert style of piercing is named after the good man.