My Winnipeg, The Book

Based on the film My Winnipeg — which I was fortunate enough to see at the 2007 Festival Nouveau Cinéma, just a few days after it premiered at TIFF and, paradoxically, long before the actual Winnipeg premiere — Coach House Books have announced the forthcoming publication of a book of the same title by Guy Maddin.

From the publisher:

At the heart of the film is Maddin’s voiceover, told in his infamous purplish prose. The book offers up this narration — extensively annotated by Maddin with a cornucopia of illuminating arcana.Venture deeper into the mind of Maddin with marginal digressions, stills, outtakes, childhood photos, animations, diary entries, collages, archival images and nascent treatments. There is a hand-drawn map of Maddin’s personal landmarks. There is an interview between Ann Savage and Maddin’s mother, and between Maddin and Michael Ondaatje. There’s even an x-ray of Toby the dog.

Details:

My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin
Coach House Books
ISBN 978-1-55245-211-0 (Book)
ISBN 978-1-55245-212-7 (Book + DVD)
May 2009

Stereo Total Returning to Montréal!

After a year-and-a-half's absence, the Berlin-based, Franco-German duo Stereo Total, a.k.a. The Best Pop Group in the World, will be returning to Montreal. The details are as follows:

Zoo-Prod présente
STEREO TOTAL
with Leslie & The Ly’s + Donzelle
LE NATIONAL - 1220 Ste-Catherine Est
Vendredi le 20 mars 09,21h*Portes20h*
Infos 514.845.2014
Admission générale

From Françoise and Bretzel :

Put the Martini into the shaker and the burger on the grill! We're going back to USA & Canada.
[...]
We are coming on tour next spring (March-April) and are just recording a tour-single called "Anti Love Song", in which all numbers are sung in really bad English, but they are negatively lovely.

I've been a huge fan of this band since I first stumbled upon Musique Automatique in the new releases at Music Trader back in 2002, attracted as I was by all the French and German (my two favourite foreign languages!) sillyness on the front and back of the packaging. It's quite thrilling all these years later to be living in a city where I can actually see them in concert; with the closure of Le Parisien cinemas, and the impending reconversion of Ex-Centris, at least there are still some upsides to living in Montreal.

So we shall tanzen im 4-eck to the Moderne Musik, and a good time will be had by all...

Translating from the French, or How might a human being put the same idea?

On the first page of the first chapter of his 2001 book The Flâneur, Edmund White describes La Défense as having gone ‘directly from being futuristic to being passé without ever seeming like a normal feature of the present’. He then goes on to say:

Honestly, instead of ‘like a normal feature of the present’ I almost wrote 'without ever being inscribed within the interior of the present'. That's how much I've been submerged in contemporary French nonfiction. I frequently have to stop and ask myself how a human being might put the same idea.

Obviously this is a bit of exaggeration for the sake of a bon mot, but as someone who does a fair bit of translation from French to English, and proofreading of texts translated from the French, I have to say that I find this absolutely hilarious. I am forever asking myself the very same question: just how would a human put that? Hmm...