A brief Italian moment

There is a small event that made my day today, or at least my morning. As I was entering the station, there was an Italian family, the father, the mother and the three children (at least three) and the kids were taking quite a lot of space and I could move forward. Their mother asked them to move and then tell me: "sorry". Walking through, I said: "Scusate". I was breathless and still half asleep, as I am every Monday, but the mother asked me, in Italian: "Are you from Italy or Québec?" I had to say, in a bad mix of Italian and English (as I was breathless and half asleep), that I was from Québec. It made me quite happy to see I could 1)pass as an Italian, again and 2)that there is such a thing as a Québec accent, even in the Italian language. I tried to ask her how she knew I was from Québec, but I don't think her English was very good, and then I didn't want to bother her longer. So that was my Italian moment.

Dernière photo de mars

Nous sommes le 31 mars et je me suis dit que je soulignerais la fin du mois en téléchargeant encore une fois une photo du Musée de l'histoire naturelle de Londres. Pourquoi, outre la volonté de mettre autant de photos récentes sur Vraie Fiction que possible? Parce que le musée en lui même est superbe, d'abord. Ensuite parce que j'y suis allé la première journée de mars cette année et que c'était une journée printannière comme aujourd'hui, quoique pas aussi chaude et sans les bourgeons qui éclorent. Ce blogue change de couleur avec les saisons, je le souligne donc ainsi, et quoi de mieux que le Musée de l'histoire naturelle pour souligner le retour du printemps. Enfin ici, c'est le printemps.

The Self-Preservation Society

I recently watched for the first time the cult classic The Italian Job. I don't know what to think of it, whether it was a good or a bad movie, but I enjoyed it a lot. I think it might be a silly comedy with a few strokes of genius. In any case, you can't go wrong with Michael Caine (well, most of the time). There is a fan website on the movie here. Anyway, a lot of it is set in Italy, including the climax, but this is really about England and a celebration of British resourcefulness and savoir-faire, a quiet, never bombastic display of patriotism. And what I found most memorable is maybe the theme song, which is the true topic of this post. The song is called "Get a Bloomin' Move On", but the only thing that stuck to my mind the first time I heard it was the line about "The Self-Preservation Society". I like it. It could be a national anthem. Given my opinions about the monarchy, I think it should be.

La date de Pâques

Il y a un an, enfin un an moins un jour, c'était Pâques 2013. Cette année, c'est le 20 avril, un jour avant ma fête. Alors ce sera encore le Carême pour un petit bout de temps. J'ai déjà posé comme question existentielle: "quelle est la meilleure date sur laquelle Pâques peut tomber?". Je n'en suis toujours pas certain, cela dit je préfère quand Pâques est en avril. En mars, c'est beaucoup trop tôt. Je ne suis pas certain non plus que si ça tombe dans le temps de ma fête, c'est une bonne chose ou non. Enfant, j'aimais bien, parce que j'associais les deux. Plus j'y pense, plus je crois que, si Pâques devait avoir une date fixe (enfin presque fixe car il faudrait que ce soit un dimanche), je préfèrerais un dimanche de début ou milieu avril. Ca donne juste assez de temps avant Pâques pour avoir hâte que ça arrive et devenir impatient et pour se remettre après de la fête et attendre les prochains jours fériés.

The fish at The Three Tuns in Henley

I am again, as it is Saturday and the weekend, carrying on the tradition of plugging a meal from a particular pub or restaurant. Today, I give something for the fish eaters among you, if they ever visit the beautiful town of Henley-on-Thames. What you can see underneath the carrots is marlin, the catch of the day on offer in The Three Tuns. In pubs, I often order the catch of the day and so far this is what I ordered at every visit at The Three Tuns. I was never disappointed. The pub itself is pretty unassuming, a small place easy to miss in the center of the town. But the food is great and the service impeccable, efficient and friendly. So far I did not try more than the soup and the fish on the menu, but I am confident about the rest too. In any case, you can't go wrong with their fish.

La chasse aux monstres?

Une idée m'est venue en tête pour de futures vacances (quand ça arrivera, ce qui veut dire je ne sais quand): aller dans un coin de l'Europe (disons la Provence, mais ça pourrait être aussi la Cornouaille, ou Klagenfurt, ou ailleurs) où un monstre légendaire y aurait vécu dans des temps immémoriaux. Je n'aurais pas besoin d'aller bien loin, l'Angleterre a un bestiaire légendaire impressionnant. J'ai eu cette idée en jetant un coup d'oeil dans ma bibliothèque et en voyant ce bouquin. Je ne l'ai encore jamais lu, même si j'ai le livre depuis longtemps: je l'ai acheté en avril 2001, lors d'un voyage en France. C'était surtout au Roussillon-Languedoc, mais j'ai fait un saut en Provence, où j'ai acheté le livre. Il est déjà usé comme si je l'avais parcouru des dizaines de fois.

Je l'ai notamment acheté, outre son titre et son sujet, parce qu'il y avait une image de la Tarasque dessus. La Tarasque est un des monstres de légende cousine du dragon qui me fascinent depuis l'enfance. Si je retournais en Provence pour des vacances, je passerais donc par Tarascon. Mais dans tous les cas, je crois que j'utiliserai le thème du monstre légendaire pour décider de mon prochain lieu de vacances.

Ending March (or almost)

It is not the last day of the month, but it is the last Friday of the month, which means that by any practical means, it feels like the month is ending, even though it is only about to end. I am rambling I know. But I find it often feels like the end of the month on the last Friday of the month more than at the true end of the month. April is looming already. And Springtime... Well, Springtime, never so much, often not until May. I like March enough as a month, because of one celebration mainly (guess which one), but the month is rarely nice through and through. It certainly was not this year, but it was nicer than last year I guess. Flowers have already started blossoming, for one. March is grey, it is a very grey month. Spring does not look like Spring much in March. Sometimes I think March should be a season.

J'aurai ta peau (Omertà)

Je ne penserais jamais que je mettrais ici une chanson interprétée par Bruno Pelletier, que je ne peux pas voir en peinture et, d'habitude, encore moins entendre. Mais il a joué un rôle et chanté J'aurai ta peau, durant la saison 2 d'Omertà. La dernière scène de la saison était puissante et peut-être la meilleure fin de saison de toute l'histoire de la télévision québécoise. Je ne sais pas trop si je la télécharge à cause de la scène ou de la musique, mais c'est superbement évocateur. La qualité du vidéo n'est pas vargeuse, mais c'est d'abord une expérience musicale, ne l'oublions pas.

Hard men and femmes fatales

I feel a bit guilty every time I upload a painting by him (or a picture of a painting by him) on Vraie Fiction, but I can't afford to purchase Fabian Perez and he is maybe my favorite painter. My favorite living one anyway. This one is called The Proposal. There are other named like this one, showing the same scene, but this is my favorite among them. I have decided to blog about it because... Well, because. Because I blogged about an archetype yesterday, I guess, and I consider Perez' characters to be very much archetypical. I know it was not the intention, but I have the feeling he paints crime fiction. This is the first thing I thought about him when I discovered his work in a local art gallery, about two years ago. The art gallery has now moved to a nearby town, but they still exhibit the work of Fabian Perez, so I thought I would pay it a visit one day and actually take my own pictures of the paintings.

So why this painting in particular? The atmosphere displayed is more of a torrid summer night than a cool and wet springtime one like the ones we have now. But I had not published one on Vraie Fiction since June 2013. And the few times I showed his work, not once a woman was featured in the painting. And Perez is famous for his glamorous portraits of women. I was mentioning archetypes. Perez pretty much paints femmes fatales. This is not the most obvious one, but I love the subtlety of the painting. We do not know exactly what the woman is proposing, but we can imagine. This is a hard man, as Perez also paints manly men, full of testosterone and self-assured, but we can see he is not as strong as this whisper. There are the usual tropes of Perez: the (sinful) red wine, the cigaret's smoke, but at the center of the picture is the whisper. I am a philistine when it comes to art, but I can appreciate it all the same.

Mot du jour: acariâtre

C'est mon cinquième mot du jour, et seulement le premier a été commenté. Alors la tradition risque de mourir dans l'oeuf. Je crois qu'avec celui-ci, ça passe ou ça casse. Le mot est donc: acariâtre. "D'une humeur difficile, querelleuse, grincheux". De Saint Achaire, évêque de Noyon qui avait la réputation de guérir les fous. Comme le catholicisme est souvent une religion acariâtre, comme l'Église catholique est souvent composée de gens acariâtres, je trouve l'origine du terme appropriée.

Pr. Moriarty (the grandfather of all modern villains?)

I have been wanting to rediscover Sherlock Holmes recently, I don't know why. I haven't read a Sherlock Holmes story since 2009, I think. And I suddenly got in the mood to read some. I might borrow a book or two at the library (yes, I know they are online, but I don't want to read it online). Sherlock Holmes is, after all, the grandfather of all modern detectives, whether they are private or from the police force. That said, I think my interest is not so much about Holmes as it is about his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, the "Napoleon of crime". I know he was never really conceived as his nemesis by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who simply invented him in The Adventure of the Final Problem to find a worthy adversary to kill his cumbersome creation. He is then mentioned in other short stories, and I believe I read them all, but I did not read yet The Valley of Fear, in which he plays a role in the plot. This is going to be my next Sherlock Holmes story, I think.

Why am I so interested by this villain, who is relatively unimportant in Holmes' canon and whose background is inconsistent? Not because of its posthumous fame, when he became, outside the canon, Holmes' archenemy. But because I believe that Doyle created the grandfather of all modern villains, maybe more than Holmes was ever the grandfather of modern heroes. Moriarty was a gang leader whose rarely, if ever, gets his hands dirty, an evil genius, he was also a bit of a mad scientist before his time (as he was a mathematician). His bastard sons are numerous. Among them: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Alain Charnier and the Greeks in The Wire. While heroes in crime fiction have become ordinary men, often intelligent but not to the point of turning into the almost inhuman thinking machine Holmes often was, there are still, even in modern fiction, evil men of exceptional nature like Moriarty. Yes, there are plenty of thugs, low-mind brutes, but even in modern crime fiction, even in realistic shows like The Wire, the exceptional criminal shows up. Crime fiction is a genre where there are still many Napoleons of crime.

Marionnette anthropomorphique

Bon, je pourrais en faire un mot du jour, mais ça sera pour un autre... jour. Ceci est une marionnette de l'artiste Ann Jones, que j'ai mentionnée ici, dans l'un de mes billets sur la Mi-Carême. C'est une marionnette anthropomorphique: la tête est celle d'une dinde ou d'une sorte de dindon, en tout cas un oiseau de la même famille, mais le corps est celui d'un hominidé. C'est la première marionnette que j'ai eue d'Ann Jones. C'est peut-être ma préférée. Il n'y en a pas une pareille, car elle incorpore des éléments naturels à chaque création. Ici, le bec du dindon est fait d'une griffe ou une dent d'ours, me suis-je laissé dire. J'ai décidé de télécharger la photo sur Vraie Fiction parce que: 1)nous sommes toujours en pleine Mi-Carême et cette marionnette a quelque chose d'étrangement carnavalesque et 2)son étrangeté me fascine. Je me demande toujours l'histoire qu'il y a derrière une image, ou une statue, ou une figurine comme celle-ci. Est-elle drôle, voire sympathique, ou inquiétante? Est-ce un homme ou une femme? Une veuve, sorte de mante religieuse mi-humaine, mi-dinde? Peut-être est-ce une créature anthropophage... Dites-moi ce que vous en pensez.

Ancient Earthquake Detector

Here is another treasure I saw during my last visit to the Natural History Museum. It it is an ancient... seismomether. An earthquake detector. It is from China, and is maybe the earliest thing we had to identify earthquake. Basically, it is a vase made of bronze with dragon's heads carved in it and surrounded by toads. Each dragon's head was holding a bronze ball. When an earthquake was coming, one of the heads would let the ball drop, indicating where the earthquake was coming from. Simple and elegant. And since people thought at the time that earthquakes were supernatural phenomenons, I find it fitting that the Chinese used a dragon to indicate their coming. Old myths meeting scientific and technological progress. The NHM has many attractions, this one is lesser known, but it is one that I particularly loved. It is a artifact of early human creativity and curiosity.

Question existentielle (222)

Je l'ai entendue au travail aujourd'hui celle-là, enfin une question s'y rapprochant, et elle m'est restée en tête:

-Peut-on juger d'une personne avec une poignée de main?

An aphorism about Monday

I am not Oscar Wilde, but I do try to emulate him as much as much as I can and sometimes I do come up with half-decent aphorisms, which I qualify as great unknown lines. Here is one I thought about going to work: "Sometimes on Monday the weekend seems two weeks away." I don't know why, but it certainly felt this way today. I was not even a particularly hard day, just moderately busy. But it felt long and I feel like the week will be long, twice longer than usual in fact. Am I the only one having this perception?

Soirée de Mi-Carême

Nous sommes le second soir de la Mi-Carême, comme vous le savez si vous avez lu mon billet d'hier. Mon père, qui a commenté le billet en question, m'a par la suite envoyé cette vidéo sur YouTube d'une soirée de Mi-Carême aux Iles de la Madeleine. L'ambiance y est carnavalesque, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire. Festive et quelque peu déjantée, voire même bizarre, avec des déguisements et des masques. Pour accompagner ce billet, j'ai décidé de télécharger la photo d'une marionnette créée par Ann Jones, une artiste de Chicoutimi. Je bloguerai un jour plus en détails sur son oeuvre, mais pour le moment je voulais une image qui accompagnerait le thème de ce billet et quoi de mieux qu'une marionnette masquée d'un masque asymétrique bien carnavalesque lui aussi. Et puis la Mi-Carême, ça me fait penser un peu au défunt Carnaval-Souvenir de Chicoutimi, alors pourquoi pas l'illustrer avec l'oeuvre d'une artiste chicoutimienne.

Classic Ghost Stories on stage

Well, this is not Halloween yet, but there is a good reason at any time of the year to enjoy a good ghost story. And let's not forget that you can prepare for Halloween months in advance, the same way you need to bake your Christmas pudding in the middle of Summer. So I prepare myself mentally for Halloween early, and when an occasion like this one arises I take it. So yes, I went to see two plays in a matinee performance, two ghost stories adapted for the stage: The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens (misspelled The Signalman for some reason) and Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M.R. James. This was the first story I ever read of M.R James and it remains one of my favourite. The production was done by Middle Ground Theatre.

So what did I think of them? I have read mixed reviews afterwards, but I really enjoyed my time. Sure, there were some technical issues: the surrounding sounds in Oh Whistle often made the conversations difficult to hear for instance. There were also some minor changes to the short story which, however minor, were not necessary, for example the cliché cat showing up as a red herring in the middle of the play. But otherwise, I really enjoyed my time. The stage gives an extra dimension to the stories and its limitations as a medium force the production to be creative to create the proper atmosphere and create the manifestations of the supernatural convincingly. I found the special effects far more effective on stage yesterday than in many horror movies I watched. It doesn't need much: a shrouded figure, a wind blowing, lights getting off and some background music. I found the way Oh Whistle went from agoraphobic to claustrophobic atmosphere particularly effective and very similar to the original short story. I was less familiar to Dickens' story, obviously, but loved how he used a modern environment, the railway, and a modern mean of transport, the train, as the setting of a ghost story. So I enjoyed my afternoon and had a few pleasant chills.

La Mi-Carême

C'est aujourd'hui le début de la Mi-Carême. J'écris à ce sujet, mais je connais assez peu cette fête, en fait, sauf pour savoir que c'est une fête carnavalesque. Je me rappelle vaguement qu'il y avait des soirées de Mi-Carême annoncées dans les journaux quand j'étais enfant, durant le Carnaval-Souvenir. Au Québec, elle est encore fêtée à certains endroits, dont Natashquan. Avec ses masques et son côté carnavalesque, je trouvais que la Mi-Carême avait une connotation un brin sinistre. Dans le sens de délicieusement sinistre. On pourrait certainement lui associer des histoires surnaturelles. Il y a également un Centre de la Mi-Carême en Nouvelle-Écosse et un site internet où l'on peut trouver des informations sur celle-ci, dont sa date. Je fais la promotion d'une fête que je ne connais pas et d'un lieu que je n'ai jamais visité (sauf en ligne), mais je crois que c'est une célébration qui mérite d'être plus connue.

The bangers and mash at Mildred's

This is my traditional weekend/Saturday post, when I plug a meal in a pub or a restaurant. This time, I am going to mention Mildred's, a vegetarian (but not vegan) restaurant in London, a very popular venue. I have been to Mildred's only twice, but every time the experience was a delight. The eating part of it anyway, the waiting, not so much. I said it is very popular and it is, almost too much. People queue to get in from outside. It is also not easy to find and its surroundings in a narrow alley in Soho is far from pleasant. That said, the food is delicious, and the restaurant itself, if packed, is lovely. I had twice the bangers and mash, a regular on their menu. It is made with tofu and white beans sausages, a carrot, parsnip and potato mash, and a pear cider gravy. Oh, and wilted kale in lieu of sauerkraut.What makes the dish truly unique are the mash and the gravy. It is filling and unlike bangers and mash it tastes healthy. Not that I mind hearty, fatty bangers and mash, but it is nice to eat something filling yet balanced. I don't regret not having meat when I go to Mildred's, and this is no small praise from the meat eater that I am.

Signes de la fin de semaine

Nous sommes samedi et on pourrait le savoir rien qu'à me regarder. J'ai sur moi les signes que nous sommes la fin de semaine: 1)je ne suis pas rasé et 2)je porte des vêtements vieux de plus de dix ans. Il paraît qu'il y a du monde qui sont plus élégants la fin de semaine. Pas moi. Je suis en mode ours à partir du samedi matin et je me prépare à ça dès jeudi, voire mercredi. Vous vous rappelez la question existentielle numéro 51? Je me demandais à quelle fréquence un homme devait se raser. Ma réponse: pas trop souvent. Donc, je ne me suis pas rasé depuis mercredi soir et je porte des vêtements sloppés, (prononcer "slâpés"). Le mode ours. Signes de la fin de semaine...