Robert Walser Roundup 19 October 2009

Following on from April's roundup of recent publishing events surrounding the œuvre of Robert Walser, six months later there's even more to report!

Firstly, the English translation of the The Tanners finally did come out, although a few months late (reaching the Canadian market on 25 August). After reading Jean Launay's 1985 French translation, reissued in 1992, I very much look forward to reading it in my mother tongue.

But Susan Bernofsky hasn't stopped there. Currently on the horizon, in addition to her forthcoming biography of Robert Walser, is a volume of Walser microgrammes, or Microscripts as they are being called, in English translation. These will be published by New Directions in the spring of 2010, coinciding with an exhibition of the microscripts at the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York. As told by Susan:

This project came about as a co-production with Christine Burgin Gallery after Burgin fell in love with Walser’s miniature manuscripts (both the sheets of paper and the handwriting that covers them are unbelievably small) and decided to put together an exhibition of them in New York, due to open in the spring of 2010. The volume Microscripts will serve as a catalogue for the exhibition—it will contain a number of high-resolution facsimiles of Walser’s beautiful manuscripts—and at the same time is a collection of stories from his late work.

As told by the gallery:

In Spring 2010 the Christine Burgin Gallery and New Directions will publish a facsimile edition of Robert Walser's microscripts with new translations by Susan Bernofsky. This will be the first publication in English illustrated by and devoted to Robert Walser's microscripts.

Details:

The Microscripts
Robert Walser
New Directions
Hardback, 160 pages
ISBN 9780811218801
25 May 2010
$24.95 US (Canadian market information unavailable at this time)

It seems to me that this book will be a cross between two books previously published by Geneva-based Éditions Zoe:

1. Le territoire du crayon (2003), 400 pages of microgramme prose in French translation.


2. Robert Walser, l'écriture miniature (2004), a 91-page album explaining what the microgrammes are, and featuring numerous reproductions of actual microgrammes, along with their French translations.
   

Despite its 400 pages, the former is in reality but a small subset of the microgrammes published in the monumental six-volume Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Mikrogramme aus den Jahren 1924–1933 (2003). Every time I see this beautiful boxed set sitting on the shelves of Das Buch on Sherbrooke Street East, I have to hold myself back from buying it, reminding myself that my German is nowhere near good enough to be able to read the Walser Microgrammes in their original language. But I digress...

Getting back on topic, believe it or not, there's even more on the way from Susan Bernofsky! On her website, she mentions a forthcoming English translation of Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories", to be published by the New York Review of Books in their Classics series. This has also been confirmed by NYRB Classics themselves. I had never even heard of the "Berlin Stories" before today. If anyone knows what these are, and what texts they correspond to in the complete works of Robert Walser in German, I'd love to hear from you...

Moving on to the French side of things, on 9 September 2009 Gallimard reissued La Rose, Bernard Lortholoary's 1987 translation of Die Rose. It's due out later this month in Canada. This book features one of my favourite Walser quotations: "Personne n'a le droit de se comporter à mon endroit comme s'il me connaissait".

Éditions Zoe have lots of Walser stuff coming out in the next few months:

• Proses brèves, vol. 2 : Nouvelles du jour is being reissued on 27 November 2009 (11 January 2010 in Canada).


• Marion Graf has translated Kleine Prosa (1917) into French for the very first time; Petite prose is to be published in Europe on 28 January 2010, and in Canada shortly thereafter.


• She's also translated a collection of Walser's 1909 poems under the title Au bureau : poèmes de 1909, which is also due out on 28 January. This volume is to include illustrations by his brother Karl Walser.
  


• Finally, Vie de poète (Marion Graf's 2006 translation of Poetenleben for Éditions Zoe) is being reissued by Le Seuil's papberback imprint Points on 28 February 2010, with a new foreword by Philippe Delerm.

Ouf! Quelle aventure... While all of this is going on, Suhrkamp too seem to have constant stream of Walser publications coming out in the original German, including Robert Walser for Idlers, a book of bons mots and aphorisms, and Der Schnee fällt nicht hinauf - 33 Gedichte, a collection of 33 (winter?) poems.

Exciting times indeed!

Jacques Tati at the Cinémathèque française

The Cinémathèque française just opened an amazing Jacques Tati exhibition (8 April - 2 August 2009) that really makes me wish I were in Paris and not here. I've noticed that in conjunction with this event, several books on Tati are to be published in April and May, but the definitive one seems to be the exhibition catalogue published by Naïve:

Before they were an independent publisher, Naïve were (and still are) an indie record label, and back in February they issued Sonorama !, a double-CD set of all of the music featured in Tati's films (which is amazing, by the way). Of course, there have been at least two other collections of Tati's film music issued on CD but, to use that word again, this really does appear to be the definitive collection.

Now if only their Canadian record distributor hadn't gone bankrupt last year, and if only their Canadian book distributor weren't so incompetent, then we'd be all set...

See also: controversy surrounding Tati's pipe and anti-tobacco legistlation.

Robert Walser: The Tanners and other new releases

In honour of the imminent publication of Susan Bernofsky's translation of Robert Walser's Geschwister Tanner (The Tanners), which until now had been inédit in the English-speaking world (although it has been available in French here in Canada since 1985), I've put together a roundup of some recent events in the world of Walser.

Firstly, Robert Walser's 1907 novel The Tanners is finally coming out in English translation for the first time, published by New Directions (distributed in Canada by Penguin and in the US by W.W. Norton) and scheduled for release on 28 April 2009. From the publisher:

The Tanners is the last major novel by the great Robert Walser to finally make it into English.

The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Four brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two are the threads with which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric.

Translated from the German, with an Afterword, by Susan Bernofsky
Introduction by W. G. Sebald (translated by Jo Catling)

“A clairvoyant of the small,” W. G. Sebald calls Walser, one of his favorite writers, in his acutely beautiful, and personal long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.

CLOTH

5X7

368 PAGES

Exciting stuff, indeed. British readers should note that the last major Bernofsky/Walser event — New Directions' June 2007 North American publication of the first ever English edition of The Assistant — was followed by a gorgeous Penguin Modern Classics edition of the same, published in March 2008 and exclusive to the British market. Something tells me that there will be a similar transatlantic arrangement between New Directions and Penguin UK for the publication of The Tanners...

In other news, although nothing is ever likely to equal the monumental Robert Walser Week that aired on France Culture in January 2007, there have nonetheless recently been a few noteworthy radio programmes about Walser:

• Public Radio International's World Books on The Assistant and The Tanners, with Susan Bernofsky [mp3] - 3 March 2009
  
• France Culture's Ça rime à quoi on Walser's poetry, with translator Marion Graf [real audio] - 25 January 2009
• RSR Espace 2's Entre les lignes on the new French translations of Prosastücke (Morceaux de prose) and selected poetry, with translator Marion Graf [audio file no longer available] - September 2008
  

Speaking of momumental undertakings, this past fall Suhrkamp published the massive, 511 page Robert Walser: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Robert Walser: His Life in Pictures and Texts), edited by noted Walser scholar Bernhard Echte. My German isn't strong enough to be able to grasp the exact nature of the project, but it looks amazing. With any luck, one of Walser's French-language publishers (I'm talking to you Zoe and Gallimard!) will decide to translate it one day (I don't think there's any hope of this ever coming out in English). I've managed to glean a few sample pages to whet your appetite:


Granted, I already have the Walser biographies written by Catherine Sauvat, Peter Utz and Marie-Louise Audiberti, but can you ever really have enough? Thankfully, Susan Bernofsky is working on And No One Ever Knew: A Biography of Robert Walser, which to my knowledge will be the first ever English language biography of Walser.

To wrap up this extended post devoted to what is clearly an obsession of mine, this past fall Geneva-based publisher Zoe issued two new volumes of Walser's works, plus a brief study of his work:

• Morceaux de prose
  
• Poèmes
• Robert Walser : le rien et le provisoire
  

With translations of lesser-known texts, as well as studies and biographies, including two splendid volumes on the famous Walser microgrammes, Zoe really is doing more to get Walser's work out there than any other French-language publisher. Kudos to them.

Spaziergang in Montreal

As someone who is (relatively) new to Montreal and enjoys a good walk, I'm expecting great things from this one:

Marcher à Montréal et ses environs
SÉGUIN, Yves
Ulysse
22 April 2009
$22.99

192 pages (with 20 maps)

Voici un guide indispensable pour quiconque cherche à s'évader, ne serait-ce que quelques heures. Il met de l'avant près de 95 lieux de randonnée situés à Montréal et ses environs. Tous des endroits accessibles en transport en commun, situés à moins d’une soixantaine de kilomètres de la métropole. Entre la rue Sainte-Catherine et l’avenue du Mont-Royal, les parcs-nature et les Grands parcs de Montréal, les collines montérégiennes et les nombreux sentiers que l’on retrouve sur la Rive-Nord... la région de Montréal offre un vaste choix pour qui veut prendre une marche de santé sans avoir à parcourir de longues distances.

I wonder which cover design they'll end up using...

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...

Les vacances de Monsieur Pitt

Before seeing Burn After Reading a few months ago, I don't think I had ever seen Brad Pitt in a film. I made no distinction between him and any number of other unintersting 'stars' in the banal Hollywood system. This Japanese advert is the second thing I've seen him in and, lo and behold, it doesn't suck either. It's an hommage to Jacques Tati's Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (with Pitt as an ersatz Monsieur Hulot), featuring a Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack. The spot was directed by Wes Anderson for the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, and was filmed in Normandy (Trouville?) in September 2008.

It's anachronistic (the original film is from 1953, and the music is from 1965) and obviously never going to be as good as the original, but at the same time when you combine 'Japanese advert', 'Serge Gainsbourg' and 'Jacques Tati', the result is always going to be worth a look, and this is certainly far more entertaining that anything we ever see in North America. Ici, on nous prend pour des cons !

As André Schiffrin once said, ‘Whoever has been in charge of selling French culture to the Japanese should be given a medal’.

Toronto Book Fair

Well, they've done it again. It wasn't enough for them to rip off the Nuit Blanche from Montreal (via Paris), now Toronto is going to have a go at a salon du livre. As an alternative to the nearly defunct Book Expo Canada, a Toronto Book Fair has been proposed for 2-4 October 2009. This is, of course, nothing more than a salon du livre, the likes of which have existed in the francophone world for many decades (Montreal since 1978, and Paris since 1981).

According to Publishers Weekly, Book Expo Canada — also known as the Dullest Literary Event in the History of the World™ — is on its last legs, as most of the publishers and distributors, including HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Scholastic, H.B. Fenn and ‘a handful of other Canadian houses’, have all decided not to attend. In its place, Reed Exhibitions (who, incidentally, are also the people behind Publishers Weekly, the Salon du livre de Paris and Book Expo Canada) are going to try to put on an English-language salon du livre in Toronto.

As these events are wildly popular in the francophone world — the six-day event ($8 admission charge per day) in Montreal attracts about 125,000 visitors every year — and as Reed know how to put on such an event through their experience with the Salon du livre de Paris, I would expect them to do a good job with a similar event in Toronto, even if the concept of a salon du livre doesn't exist in the anglophone world and even if the demand for books is considerably greater in Paris than it is in Toronto.

All of this begs the question: why does Toronto keep copying everything done in Montreal and/or Paris? If Paris is a first-rate city, and Montreal following them in almost everything they do (see Vélib' v. Bixi for the latest example) makes us a second-rate city, does that make Toronto a third-rate city?

The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe

The Rain Before It Falls, the latest novel by Jonathan Coe, will FINALLY be coming out in paperback in North America in a few weeks. It really does suck being under the thumb of the Americans to such an extent that we have to wait several months before being able to read the latest offering by one of our best contemporary novelists.

The hardback came out on 6 September 2007 in Britain, but not until 11 March 2008 in Canada, and the paperback on 5 June 2008 in the UK but not before 10 March 2009 over here. I'm sure they don't have to put up with this stuff in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc., and I'm sick of having to deal with it in Canada. It happens all the time: some American publisher (in this case Random House) buys the US rights to a book, and tacks on the Canadian rights as an afterthought. Then we have to wait until the publisher gets around to publishing it in the United States, very often with an impossibly ugly cover design, while the rightful publisher (in this case Penguin) is forbidden from selling the proper British edition in Canada. I've said it before, and I'll surely say it again: Canadians are the forgotten children of the Commonwealth.

At least in this instance, the American cover design is not a complete disaster and, as an added bonus, Random House USA have even been nice enough to not change the title of the book. That's right; sometimes the American publisher will even change the title of a book to something Americans can understand, and we Canadians have to suffer the consequences. A prime example of this is what Random House USA did (and continue to do) with Coe's first major success, What a Carve Up!

Over the years, Penguin UK have come up with a number of classy paperback cover designs for this one:

But rather than come up with something halfway decent, the Americans decided to put forth this atrocity:

Of course, coming up with an awful cover wasn't enough; they also had to change the title to something comprehensible to Americans. To this day, unless you want to import a proper British edition, at great personal expense, this is the only edition that you are ALLOWED to buy in Canada.

All of this being said, Jonathan Coe really is one of my favourite English writers, and I am very much looking forward to reading his latest. As it happens, it has just come out in France, so there's plenty of media coverage to go through while we wait for the North American paperback, including:

• Interview with Jonathan Coe in Télérama
• A ten-minute extract [Real Player] from The Rain Before It Falls, read by Yasmine Modestine (broadcast on France Culture on 8 January 2009)
• Review in L'Express
• Review in Le Temps (Geneva)
• Review in La Libre (Brussels)
• Review in Le Point
• Review in Le Monde
• etc.

Swedish Invasion!

Happy New Year to one and all!

I've been away from the blog for a few weeks, and obviously everyone knows this already, but in the interests of complétude, I feel I should finish what I started back on 29 November.

To begin, for anyone who managed to miss it, a revue de presse from mid-December:

• IKEA store coming to Winnipeg


• IKEA eyes Winnipeg location


• The road to IKEA


• Store expected to draw shoppers into Winnipeg


• What is IKEA anyway?


• We were offended that IKEA was snubbing us


• $18.5 M to redo roads for IKEA


• Retailers see more winners than losers with new outlet

And, confirming the trend of a veritable synergie suédoise happening in Winnipeg, H&M are coming to town as well, apparently at Polo Park where the Safeway is (was?):

Only days after international home furnishings giant IKEA unveiled plans to build a new 350,000-square-foot destination store in southwest Winnipeg, a spokeswoman for one of the world's largest clothing and fashion retailers-- Sweden-based H&M -- said it's also got its eye on Winnipeg for expansion.

"We are expanding throughout Canada and we're always looking for new and great cities to expand into," Emily Scarlett said Thursday. "And being a major city, Winnipeg is definitely on our radar screen."

[...]

H&M is rumoured to be looking at the former Canada Safeway space in Polo Park Shopping Centre, but Scarlett and Polo Park general manager Deborah Green would neither confirm nor deny that.

This really is a juste retour des choses, as Winnipeg was known as the 'Swedish Capital' of Canada up until World War II.

IKEA in Winnipeg?

Having heard rumours of IKEA opening a store in Winnipeg for as long as I can remember, I'm always skeptical when this story pops up in the media every few months. That being said, after listening to this report on CBC Radio, and reading these two items in the Free Press, it would seem that it might actually happen this time. Although not for a few years. The company has apparently even identified a site in Winnipeg that they would like to develop. Generally speaking, I'm against big-box stores and the like but, to paraphrase the American president-elect, this would be urban sprawl that we can believe in.

For whatever reason, I happen to love their stuff. Perhaps it's because of my Swedish roots (which I'm sure are clearly discernable from my Blogger photo), or just because I'm an aesthete who happens to be poor. Either way, they make well-designed stuff that I really dig, and they sell it very cheaply (the latter being the key to their future success in Winnipeg). Going to the store is part of the experience too; depending on the time of day, you can go to the restaurant and eat Swedish meatballs or one dollar breakfast (eggs, sausages and hashbrowns). They even have a Swedish grocery store! It's all just too much fun...

IKEA in Winnipeg would be very good news indeed. I've had the experience of ordering a table from their website, only to find that they've left it at the post office because I wasn't home when they came to deliver it (in the middle of the working day, when no one is ever home). I believe they've since improved their mail-order delivery service, but nothing beats the same-day, flat rate delivery that you get when you have a store in your city. Although I now live only 15 minutes away from an IKEA store (5 minuites bike + 10 minutes bus), as someone who has dragged IKEA products home from the post office on Corydon Avenue I can sympathise with all those people back home desperate to get a store there. If I had had a reliable car back in those days, I would have done my shopping in person in Minneapolis, currently the closest city to Winnipeg to have an IKEA store. But that's still an 8-hour drive away, plus the Canadian dollar is once again losing value vis-à-vis its American counterpart, plus, since Americans seem to think that the September 11 terrorists came from Canada, it's becoming more and more difficult to cross the border. What I'm trying to say here is that Winnipeg really needs an IKEA store.

The main obstacle to building an IKEA in Winnipeg has always been the old rule of thumb that IKEA only builds stores where they can draw from a minimum population of one million people (Winnipeg's population is only 750,000). There apparently used to be a store in Halifax, which is a city much smaller than Winnipeg, but that could draw customers from all over the atlantic provinces. It ended up closing down in any case. In the same CBC Radio item, someone asserts that a Winnipeg store could draw customers from neighbouring Saskatchewan (also sans IKEA), but this has never been true, has it? After all, why wouldn't they simply go to Edmonton or Calgary where there is no provincial sales tax. At best, a Winnipeg store could regularly draw people from Northwestern Ontario, and perhaps from Grand Forks if the Canadian dollar loses enough value.

Anyway, I really hope this happens. If H&M (that other pillar of stylish, low-cost living from Sweden) were also to open a store in Winnipeg, I might even be able to move back for good. Until then, I'll keep on pretending to be Swedish out here. There's something called Tiger of Sweden opening in Montreal in spring 2009, and I can't wait to find out what it is!

L'Histoire criminelle des anglo-saxons

New from the wonderfully zany world of Québécois publishing, we have L'histoire criminelle des anglo-saxons (literally, The Criminal History of the Anglo-Saxons) by a chap called Normand Rousseau.

Although best known as the publisher of dodgy new age books (as seen on her website), Louise Courteau has varied her output here with a violent, anti-English polemic. The description on the back cover reads as follows:

L'ethnie anglo-saxonne est née dans la violence des affrontements avec les Celtes et les Vikings.

Les Anglais ont torturé presque à plaisir l'Irlande pendant sept siècles la réduisant à la grande famine qui fit plus d'un million de morts. De plus, ils ont conquis par la force les Écossais et les Gallois qu'ils ont assimilés.

Les Anglo-Saxons ont été responsables des guerres de Cent ans et de Sept ans qui ont fait des milliers de morts.

Les Anglo-Saxons sont partis à la conquête de la terre tout entière pour fonder l'Empire britannique. En Australie, ils ont commis des génocides envers les Tasmaniens et les Aborigènes. En Nouvelle-Zélande, ils ont écrasé les Maoris et leur ont volé leur pays. En Inde, ils ont détruit l'économie d'un grand peuple, ont réprimé dans le sang la révolte des Cipayes et sont responsables du massacre d'Amritsar.

Les Anglo-Saxons sont responsables de la Traite des Noirs, de la déportation des Amérindiens et des Irlandais. Ils sont responsables des génocides des Beothuck de Terre-Neuve.

En Afrique, ils ont volé l'Afrique du Sud aux Boers, ont inventé les camps de concentration bien avant les nazis où 26 000 femmes et enfants sont morts; ils ont pillé l'or et les diamants de ce pays et pratiqué l'apartheid envers les Africains.

Les Anglo-Américains ont exterminé les Amérindiens, pratiqué l'esclavage des Noirs, volé la moitié du Mexique, ont agressé le Canada, Cuba, la France et l'Espagne.

Ils ont pratiqué la discrimination et la ségrégation envers les Noirs jusqu'au milieu du 20e siècle.

Ils ont été les premiers à utiliser la bombe atomique contre un autre pays et ils ont écrasé un petit peuple comme les Vietnamiens.

Les Anglo-Canadiens ont volé le Canada à la France, ont déporté les Acadiens, ont dépossédé les Amérindiens et écrasé les Métis. Mais ils n'ont pas réussi à assimiler les Canadiens-français, malgré tous leurs efforts.

Les Anglais ont inventé l'eugénisme et les Anglo-Américains l'ont mis en pratique, bien avant les nazis.

Les Anglo-Saxons ont imposé au quart de la planète leur langue, leur religion ainsi que leur culture par la force des armes, de l'économie et de la politique.

L'ethnie anglo-saxonne domine la planète depuis les deux derniers siècles et sa domination n'est pas finie. Ce livre la met devant ses crimes et apprend aux autres ethnies à bien la connaître et à s'en méfier.

Ce livre invite les Anglo-Saxons à réparer tous les crimes qu'ils ont commis depuis des siècles. La belle image qu'ils tentent de se donner ne doit pas nous faire illusion.

For those of you who don't read French, I've translated the best bits (my comments in parentheses):

• The Anglo-Saxon ethnicity was born of the violent clashes between Celts and Vikings.
• The English tortured the Irish and assimilated the Scots and the Welsh.
  
• The Anglo-Saxons were responible for the Hundred Years' War and the Seven Years' War, which led to thousands of deaths (yes, thousands!).
• The Anglo-Saxons are responsible for the slave trade (it's not like the French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch had anything to do with it...).
• They stole South Africa from the Boers and invented concentration camps well before the Nazis came up with the idea.
• They discriminated against Blacks until the mid-twenieth century (that never happened in Quebec, did it? And in France? Unthinkable! Impossible!).
• Anglo-Canadians stole Canada from the French (how can people that the author himself identifies as Canadians steal Canada? Only a clown would fail to recognise that Europeans collectively stole America from the Aboriginal populations.).
• The English invented eugenics and the Anglo-Americans put it into practice long before the Nazis got around to it.
• Through military, cultural and economic force, the Anglo-Saxons have imposed their language upon a quarter of the planet.
• The Anglo-Saxons have dominated the world for the past two centuries (obviously, the French were never in a position of dominance, right?).
  
• This book is an invitation to all Anglo-Saxons to repent for the crimes they've committed over the centuries.
  

Golly! I'm not sure if I should apologise for being Anglo-Saxon, or demand an apology from myself for the slave trade that brought my paternal ancestors over to this hemisphere in the first place. Skipping lightly over that conundrum, it has to be said that this is quite simply a brillant satirical book from an up-and-coming talent of the Quebec comedy circuit. It actually makes you proud to be Canadian, to be able to live in a country that supports the arts (as seen on the left-hand sidebar of her website, Louise Coutreau's publishing programme is subsidized by the governments of Quebec and Canada). And thanks to the first-rate system for new releases known as la grille d'office, virtually every bookshop in Quebec received at least one copy of this little gem, whether they requested it or not.

I invite all interested readers to go and have a laugh with Monsieur Rousseau at his upcoming stand-up gigs at the Salon du livre de Montréal on 22 and 23 November 2008. Sacré farceur ! Qu'est-ce qu'on rigole bien...

Making Friends in English

Perhaps one day I'll get the hang of it...

Tout cela pour en arriver là

After reading this last week I got all excited because I thought something good was finally going to happen in Winnipeg, but in the end it seems that rapid transit for Winnipeg is going to come in the form of a busway. *yawn* By the way, isn't this the same plan that Glen Murray came up with several years ago (except that it was cheaper back then) and that Sam Katz cancelled because he wanted to spend the money on Community Centres for Families™ (even though he ended up closing community centres anyway?). Yeah, I thought so...

Fake rapid transit is not what going to have me running back to live in Winnipeg. Once you've had rail, you'll never go back to bus. Sadly, the people of Winnipeg are not likely to get a taste of rail any time soon. After all, it's not like Winnipeg has rail lines running through the whole city already and it's not like Winnipeg is the capital of a province that's a net exporter of hydroelectricity, so it makes sense to use diesel buses instead of electric trains. Oh wait, Winnipeg is all of those things, so no it doesn't.

Anyway, while we wait for this to come into being I'll go on enjoying this

Following Euro 2008 from Canada

Well, Euro 2008 is in full swing now and, as ever, it's not that easy to keep on top of everything when you're stuck in the backwater footballistique that is Canada. Obviously, things get easier with every major tournament as the amount of coverage available on the Internet increases, but none of the British Home Nations have qualified this time round, and the amount of English-language coverage of Euro 2008 has suffered as a consequence. Fortunately for the Canadian who has taken one of his country's fundamental principles to heart, there's still plenty of French-language coverage available to go along with what remains of the British coverage. After all, France are qualified for the tournament, and Switzerland, one of the host countries, is partially French-speaking.

Here then, without further ado, is The Canadian's Guide to Following Euro 2008 From afar.

The Basics:
Television Schedule [English]
Television Schedule [French]

Feed your feed reader:
If you do the whole RSS thing, I've put together a feed that you can subscribe to. It features a good mix of Euro 2008 news and views, in both English and French. You can also view the items as a web page. The most recent items from this feed will also appear in the right-hand sidebar of this blog for the duration of the competition.

Listen on the go:
There are also plenty of Euro 2008 podcasts out there to listen to. I'm currently subscribed to the following:

• Mark Chapman [iTunes feed]
  
• ESPNsoccernet [feed] - I've never gone to ESPN for the footy before, but have been pleasantly surprised by this one
  
• Radio Suisse Romande (aggregation of all their Euro 2008 programming) [feed]
  
• BBC Radio Five Live [feed]
  
• The Guardian [feed]
• Europe 1 [feed] - The Club Europe 1 Euro 2008 is the station's daily, wide-ranging Euro 2008 flagship programme. Four hours of daily programming edited into a quite brilliant 90 minute podcast.
  

Disappointing:
RTL has plenty of audio on its website, but the podcast feeds (if they even exist), en bonne tradition française, are very well hidden indeed.

This post will be updated as new information becomes available. The custom Euro 2008 feed that I've put together is being fine-tuned on an ongoing basis.

I'm back with scars to show

I haven't posted here in almost a month, but I have lots of good excuses:

1. I'm never sick, but was sick three times during the month of April. Feeling better now, fortunately.


2. Tax returns. Yes, tax returns plural. In Quebec you have to file a completely separate provincial return too. Killer.
   


3. I really enjoy listening to podcasts (MP3 over RSS), especially French and British ones, but my MiniDisc setup just hasn't been letting me enjoy them in the way I want to. I'm so tired of Sony and SonicStage and all that they've done to cripple the MiniDisc format. Consequently, I've been thinking about getting an MP3 player for a couple of years now. While I was ill and feeling depressed a couple of weeks ago, I finally caved in and bought my first iPod (6th generation iPod Classic, 160 GB), not because I think it's particularly hip or well designed, but because of the seamless podcast integration in iTunes. I can no longer deal with all of the complications of transferring files via SonicStage, nor the inconvenience of swapping MDs when I want to listen to different music or different podcasts. So I've been happily busying myself with adding podcast subscriptions and transferring all of my music. The thing is already half-full!
   


4. In turns out that in Quebec, if you don't give your landlord three months' notice that you're moving, your lease is automatically renewed for another year. I find it a bit odd to provide this kind of protection to property owners at the expense of poor, impoverished renters, given that this is supposed to be the paradise for progressive social policy (in North America at any rate). After all, in Manitoba there was always a form to sign every year, and none of this implied renewal business. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that my current lease expires on 31 July 2008, so I had until the end of this month to tell the landlord that I want out of this overpriced trou pourri that passes for an apartment. Consequently, I spent most of the past month desperately searching for something better, with the April 30th deadline hanging over me the whole time.
   
   I signed the lease on much better place last Tuesday, so I can finally breathe easy. I'll be moving from being right next to Université-de-Montréal Métro Station, to being right next to Mount Royal Train Station. I'll be a bit further away from downtown, but only a nine minute train ride from Gare Centrale, versus the 20 minutes it currently takes me to reach essentially the same destination on the Métro (including transfer from the Blue Line to the Orange Line). Technically speaking, my new apartment is not actually in Montreal proprement dit, but in the independent Town of Mount Royal which is located in the centre of the Island of Montreal. This is neat because Mount Royal was designed and built by the old Canadian Northern Railway, the same company that built the inland freshwater resort at Grand Beach in my home province of Manitoba, a favourite childhood destination of mine.


5. I'm now on Twitter (see sidebar for live updates).


6. The 2008 edition of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is happening this week, and I'm running the English-language section of the festival bookshop. Stress, stress, stress!!! Tomorrow we're bringing all of the stock downtown (several trips with the van) and setting up, then the festival runs from Wednesday to Sunday, and Monday we're returning the unsold stock to the publishers. Lots of twelve-hour days in perspective. On the bright side, I'm hoping to meet Nora Young, a favourite CBC personality and adolescent radio crush of mine, who will be hosting an event on Saturday night.
   

Don't expect too many posts anytime soon, as it won't be long until I start to stress about the move, and that should keep me occupied until well into July.

La manipulation de l'information par Radio-Canada

On 25 and 27 March, Radio-Canada (the French-language division of the CBC) reported, in outraged tones, that "more and more" [they never actually quantify this notion] students from France are coming over here to study at Quebec's English-language universities, thanks to a 1978 agreement between the governments of France and Quebec that allows French and Québécois students to attend university on the opposite side of the Atlantic as if they were locals. The facts indignantly enumerated in the article include:

• French students come over here and pay almost as little tuition as would a Québécois student, which is apparently a "great savings" for these foreigners, representing a veritable "gold mine" for them.
  
• The number of French students currently studying in English in Quebec is greater than the total number of Québécois students currently studying in France [whose fault is that?].
  

It wasn't long before one of our usual suspects weighed in on the affair. Jean Dorion, head of the ultra-nationalist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, declared the situation to be "scandalous", especially while "our" university students continue to see their tuition fees increase [oy, boyo! Petit un, they're still the cheapest in North America and, petit deux, that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this debate!].

Thankfully, in the 2 April 2008 edition of Le Devoir, François Alabrune, the Consul general of France in Quebec City, was given the opportunity to respond to the polémique. Il a relativisé as follows:

• 6,400 French nationals are currently attending Quebec universities, representing 3 out of every one thousand French university students.
• Approximately 1,000 Québécois are currently studying in French universities, representing 4 out of every one thousand Québécois university students.
• Québécois students in France have enjoyed the same low tuition fees as the locals going back to well before the establishment of the 1978 agreement, that is to say long before the French enjoyed the same privileges over here.
• University tuition in France is only $400, versus $1800 over here, so maybe it isn't such a great deal for those freeloading French students after all [désolé Monsieur Dorion].
  
• According to Quebec Ministry of Education, 85% of the 6,400 French nationals studying in Quebec are doing so in French-language universities.
• Of all the countries in the world, France has the third-highest number of foreign nationals studying in its universities, and Québécois students are more than welcome [we complain that more French students come over to study in English than the total number of Québécois that go over there, but that's because only 1,000 Québécois have chosen to go over there! How can you blame that on France?].

The only useful point made in the Radio-Canada articles is that the 1978 co-operation agreement was meant to "strengthen the French fact in Quebec", and that French students coming over to study in English-language universities in Quebec goes against the spirit of that agreement. Michelle Courchesne, the provincial Minister of Education, has said that she'll look into "renegotiating the terms of the co-operation agreement", and that's fine by me.

All the rest of it, getting worked up into a tizzy and the like, was just another opportunity for the Québécois to go after what appear to me, after having lived here for 20 months, to be their two favourite scapegoats: the local anglophone population (and its institutions), and France and the French.

Damn You, Cineplex Entertainment (An ONEX Corporation)

So, according to Le Devoir, Cineplex Entertainment is blackmailing art house film distributors into helping kill off the network of independent salles parallèles cinemas in rural Quebec. Basically, because K-Films Amérique, a local distributor of foreign and domestic art house fare, has decided to show the forthcoming French film Un baiser s'il vous plaît (which, by the way, is supposed to be quite good) in salles parallèles in Rimouski, Victoriaville and Sept-Îles, in addition to Cineplex locations in Montreal and Quebec City, Cineplex has decided to pull the film. Never mind the fact that they were never going to show this film in those towns anyway (art house films weren't even being shown in towns like that at all until the salles parallèles came about), they just for whatever reason feel they should have exclusive, Quebec-wide rights to any film that they screen in Montreal, even when they themselves do not have any intention of presenting them across Quebec. In the past few months they've also pulled 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (last year's Palme d'or at Cannes), as well Up the Yangtze.

Cineplex, and the other mainstream commerical cinemas represented by the Association des propriétaires de salles de cinéma du Québec, claim that the salles parallèles represent unfair competition, because they are partially subsidised by the SODEC. But these are the same mainstream commercial cinemas that refuse to show art house films outside of the major metropolitan areas, and whose refusal to do so led to the creation of the salles parallèles in the first place! When it comes right down to it, the salles parallèles do $600,000 of business a year, versus $450,000,000 for commercial cinemas in Quebec. This competition argument hasn't got a leg to stand on. They just want to kill off all cinéma d'auteur so that the only option remaining for people is to go and see the same Hollywood rubbish they've been forcing down our throats since long before I was born. When I was just on the cusp of my twenties, I graduated from this to this, and there's no way I'm going back now!

What is wrong with this company, anyway? Notice how they renamed the Paramount Cinema in downtown Montreal the Scotia Bank Cinema? What has Scotia Bank got to do with cinema? No doubt this has more to do with Gerry being on the board of both Scotia Bank and Cineplex (via ONEX) than anything else. He may be a fellow Winnipegger and University of Manitioba old boy, but I'm afraid he's trying to do to the culture of cinema in this country what his wife is doing the culture of books.

Let's just boycott the whole thing, shall we? Independent cinemas like the Cinémathèque, the Globe Cinema and the Park Theatre in Winnipeg, as well as Ex-Centris, Cinéma du Parc, Cinéma Beaubien and the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal are definitely the way to go. Stay away from Chapters/Indigo while you're at it too.

By the way, ridiculous commercial practices such as this give rise to the following comments that find their way into Le Devoir

«Cela veut-il dire que c'est à Toronto qu'on décidera si le cinéma d'auteur pourra être vu en région au Québec?», dénonce M. Dussault.

«C'est Toronto qui applique sa loi, et c'est le public francophone qui écope», a tonné Michel Gagnon.

«Il faut que Québec s'en mêle pour remettre un peu d'ordre dans tout ça. Ce n'est pas Toronto qui doit décider de ce qui va se diffuser au Québec», ajoute M. Gagnon.

which in turn continues to give the rest of Canada (as represented by Toronto) a bad name in Quebec. Thanks a lot Gerry. Well done!

Melody Day by Caribou

I've been so out of touch with the scene lately that I didn't even realise that the sublime intro music to Louise Bourgoin's weather report on Canal+ is actually a Canadian indie song. La preuve en images:

This impossibly lush song is in fact Melody Day by Vancouver's Caribou. Before this Dick threatened him with legal action, Caribou used to be called Manitoba, which is where I come from, and last night he played Montreal, which is where I live. Et voilà, la boucle est bouclée.