Umberto Eco, 1932-2016

Décidément, 2016 est cruelle.

Sans Umberto Eco, je ne serais pas la chercheuse que je suis aujourd’hui. C’est aussi simple que cela. Je n'exagère pas.

Avec Maurice Halbwachs, Husserl, Paul Connerton et Benedict Anderson, Umberto Eco a construit la base de mon approche analytique. Je suis une anthropologue historique. J’étudie comment les personnes et les communautés s’imaginent et se représentent leur passé, leur présent (et leur existence) et leur avenir. J’étudie comment les narrations qu’elles se font modèlent leurs vie. En quoi elles constituent leur encyclopédie. Je conçois ces narrations de manière phénoménologique, comme étant vécue et ressentie, et j’approche ces histoires, ces textes par la poétique d’Eco. Sans L’Œuvre ouverte, Lector in Fabula et Les Limites de l’interprétation, je ne serais pas qui je suis. Dans ma thèse de doctorat, j’ai 70 pages de théorie et Eco s’y trouve dans presque toutes. Dans mes travaux sur le doublage au Québec, ses réflexions sur la traductions sont partout.

Sans Eco, je ne serais rien.

Mon texte préféré, De Bibliotheca, est une toute petite plaquette, une conférence donnée à Milan en 1985, sur ses bibliothèques préférées (dont Robarts à UofT), sa conception de la bibliothèque idéale, sur Borgès et du bibliothécaire dans Le Nom de la Rose. L’ayant lu dans une édition rare des Éditions Échoppe de 1986, j’en n’ai trouvé une copie pour moi qu’en 2010, dans une minuscule libraire d’Ottawa. J’ai sauté de joie.

J’ai bien sûr lu tous ses romans et presque tous ces autres livres. J’ai bien aimé Le Nom de la Rose et adoré Le Pendule de Foucault*, mais mon roman préféré du Maestro est La Mystérieuse Flamme de la reine Loana. Je me souviens d’en être bien surprise sur le moment, mais c’était pourtant évidant. Le roman présente les dernières réminiscences d’un homme d’âge mûr, au prise avec un AVC majeur, dans l’inconscience des dernières heures de sa vie. C’était pourtant évident, mon roman préféré d’Eco présente la narration constitutive d’un homme à la fin de sa vie.

Il n’y a pas de mot pour exprimer combien je suis triste qu’il n’y aura plus de nouvelles publications du Professore. Bien sûr, il y aura des amas posthumes, mais seront-ils vraiment de lui, ou de ses éditeurs colligeant des fragments pour nous ses élèves attristés?

* Je t’emmerde, Dan Brown

NC is the new Scarlet Letter (musings about my non-compliant tattoo)

[This post has been in draft for weeks now, so I might as well publish it, in all its fuzzy logic glory now, because I doubt I'll ever finish it soon.]

Last December, my mother, my sister and I each got a version of the fast-spreading feminist tattoo phenomenon that is the Non-Compliant logo from the comic Bitch Planet. Hundreds, probably thousands, of women in North America also have gotten this tattoo, to symbolize and announce their independence from gender norms and their lack of fear at not being what society wants us all to be. I do not regret it at all. I have had complements, questions and a few women have had loud, heartfelt belly laughs when I told them about it. My brother-in-law asked me if I was going to be thrown away now that I had been stamped non-compliant, but he's an engineer and he does not get it. That's ok, he's a dear that way.

In any case, I have been thinking about all of us who now bear the mark, and I think I stumbled in something interesting. The NC tattoo is kind of another scarlet letter. The branded A on the adulteress's chest was meant as a mark of shame, but Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroine managed to find some pride in her actions, even through all her guilt. I think Kelly Sue DeConnick, the author of Bitch Planet, imagined the NC logo branded on the women sent to the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost to serve as a Scarlet Letter in the narrative. I think the parallel, the literary reference, is intentional. These women, who are too fat, too black, too willful, too independent, too strong for society, are deemed non-compliant, branded as such, and sent away. And yet, most of the characters in the comic manage to find pride, or anger at least, in their predicament. In this way, NC is A but multiplied. Which is why so many women, like my mother, my sister and I chose to brand ourselves with it. In the world of Bitch Planet, I can assure you I'd have been sent there a long time ago! To be frank, my sister would have gotten the Scarlet letter a few hundred years ago too.

The key difference is the pride in not complying. All these women do not comply to society's expectations in women, in gender definitions, in body type, in behaviour. I will not comply. My sister will not comply. My mother has turned not listening to anyone into an art phone! And we will flaunt our stubbornness and our strength and our difference. I'm fat, I'm loud, I'm usually the smartest person in the room, and I've got tired of hiding that fact around age 28.

There is it.

Slow journaling: Élisabeth Vonarburg

Élisabeth Vonarburg, Les Voyageurs malgré eux, 2009 (1994).

Slow Journaling, jour 5

Jour 5

Mon fils, critique de livre

Un des livres préférés de mon fils est Les Transports de Xavier Deneux (Milan, 2013). Mon fils l'appelle d'ailleurs exactement cela: "Je veux lire Les Transports de Xavier Deneux". Un beau livre cartonné, un imagier-gigogne aux dessins adorables sur le thème préféré du Chaton. Beaux graphismes, très peu de mots.

Le Chaton a récemment compris que les livres sont écrits par des auteurs et dessinés par des illustrateurs, que certains ont des recherchistes, des graphistes. J'en suis très fière. Il a aussi compris que les auteurs sont responsables des choses qui fonctionnent moins dans un livre ou que l'on aime moins dans un livre. Ce qui est merveilleux, mais mène à de drôles de conversations.

Hier soir avant le coucher, nous avons lu le "gros livres des transports", puis "Les Transports de Xavier Deneux". Mais la lecture du second a pris près de 15 minutes, parce qu'à chaque page, mon fils m'a expliqué toutes les choses que Xavier Deneux a oublié ou aurait du faire différemment. "Il faut lui dire, maman, à Xavier Deneux, han? Mamam, il faut lui dire."

Voici donc ce que pense mon fils:

L'autobus: Il aurait fallu que Xavier Deneux ai dessiné un enfant à chaque fenêtre et surtout dessiné le chauffeur. Le Chaton est très choqué de cet oubli

La voiture: Il manque une voiture au deuxième étage du stationnement.

L'avion: Il en aurait fallu quatre, pas trois. Trois, ce n'est pas assez.

Le train: Il aurait fallu sept wagons. 20 wagons, c'est trop long.

Le bateau: "Mais il ne faut pas toucher aux coquillages quand il y a des créatures dedans, maman. Et pas aux méduses."

La montgolfière: "Où l'oiseau vert va trouver sa montgolfière, maman? Il manque une montgolfière."

La fusée: Il n'a rien à redire de la fusée.

Est-ce que sa critique se rendra à Xavier Deneux? Qui sait, mais j'ai fait ma part, comme promis.

Thoughts on _The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists_, Jeff and Ann Vandermeer, eds.

Promised as a sequel of sorts to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, edited in 2003 by Mark Roberts and Jeff Vandermeer, The Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011) is a collection of disjointed writings by a host of well-known Anglophone genre authors. I was very much looking forward to reading it, having loved the first volume and kept it in my library since. Nevertheless, I had not heard of the publication of the volume until I noticed the cover during one of my regular Amazon perusal sessions. I bought it and quickly realised why it had not made the splash the first volume had.

Thre book is, unfortunately, a disappointment. Where the first volume was coherent in format, presenting the histologies of vastly divergeant (and very imaginative) mock ailments; this collection is anything but. I used the word "disjointed" earlier and it is a apt description for the ensemble of texts that can be found here. After a humourous introduction, presenting the biography of Dr. Lambshead's subsequent years since the original 1922's publication of the Pocket Guide, we are presented with a sequence of descriptions of objects that were once part of Lambshead's collection. These descriptions follow a familiar catalogue format: artefact name, author of description, date of artifact creation, creator, provenance(s) and current location, accession number, followed by the object's history, uses and effects, usually illustrated. Unfortunately, after a few of those very enjoyable segments, follows several short stories, very loosely related to Dr. Lambshead (who is mostly inferred, not seen), short stories of very unequal quality. Then the catalogue format returns, followed more or less strictly, and other artifacts are introduced.

Were it not for the short stories, this book might have been, at least, coherent and more enjoyable. The Pocket Guide's entries had not been of equal quality, far from it, but the ensemble was what had made the book into such an interesting literary creature. Here, however, the Vandermeer failed in creating something of equal value. Even if both volumes share many of the same authors, the feeling is much different.

The most striking of these differences is in tone. In The Cabinet, it was clear from the introduction that I was missing entire levels of humour that are really just a bunch of inside jokes, mostly at the expense of Michael Moorcook, Naomi Novik and especially Caitlin R. Kiernan. I am certain that these passages are extremely funny to those who personally know these authors and the others mentioned, but I do not (even if I do know a whole bunch), neither do most of the book's readership. One recognizes there is humour. One cannot share it.

I purchased the epub version of The Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. If I find a used or highly discounted dead tree copy of the book, I may purchase it, so that The Pocket Guide won't be alone on my shelf. I will not, however, ever buy a full price copy. That would be a waste of money.

Lus récemment/read recently

Encore quelques lectures pour le plaisir.

Veronica Schanoes, Burning Girls (Tor.com Original). This is one of the best things I have read in years. I am not exagerating. I am not kidding. This is how Urban Fantasy should be. Jewish women, immigrants in New York, demons and witches, and labour unrest in the 1920s. So good. You'll cry at the end. This novella is free on Kindle. Go read.

Derek Landy. The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Tenth Doctor and Martha land on a planet than didn't exist before and somehow find themselves in the middle of one of Martha's favourite childhood book, a riff on The Famous Five series called The Troublemakers. Trouble ensues. Since this series of novellas were written by children's writers, it made sense, somewhat, that one of them would play up on the children's books theme, but it makes the story very simplistic, as simplistic as the Famous Five novels were. I remember those; I read a bunch of them in French as Le Club des Cinq and I watched the tv series.

Charles Carpentier. Une ville souterraine. Histoire merveilleuse (collection ArchéoSF, Publie.net). Un historien amateur (un "antiquaire"), se promenant dans la campagne du Département de la Manche, découvre qu'une ville romaine habitée existe sous un plateau près de d’Avranches. Le texte est didactique et descriptif, l'action se passe presque entièrement hors champs et la belle meurt à la fin. Publié à l'origine en 1885, ce court roman du genre "civilisation perdue" est, franchement, très ennuyant. Je ne le recommanderais qu'à ceux qui, comme moi, étudient les littératures de l'imaginaire du 19e siècle et de l'Âge de Radium de la SFF (1900-1939).

Read recently

• Suw Charman-Anderson, Queen of the May (Chocolate and Vodka). A well-known analyst and journalist, she is also an interesting blogger and a very good author. As with her previous novella Argleton (which is great, go read it), Queen of the May starts by taking you to what might seem like a familiar journey and then slips sideways. Argleton took a very prosaic trek to find the eponymous copyright-trap shadow-town inserted in Google Maps (for real) and tipped into science fiction. Queen of the May starts with a English-Indian botanist taking a walk in a neighbourhood park but then marches in to Fairyland. Ultimately, this novella is about female autonomy and feminism. Loved it.

• Darren Naish, Cryptozoologicon: Volume I (Irregular Books). I like cryptozoology. It's amusing to me. All these creatures that some people want so much to exist, all the legends of both supernatural and pseudo-natural animals that live in our collective imaginings and traditional lore! I just love them. I love to read about them. So when a blog I read suggested this book would "change the way we look at cryptozoology" (and because the Kindle edition was very cheap), I bought it. I was very dissapointed. Not by the creatures and the lore, but by the tone. Naish claims to aim at presenting what is actually known about cryptids based on what is purported about them, and to do so in good humour. Unfortunately, the text quickly becomes a laughing fest at the expense of all those who believe in cryptids. Even the sections where Naish tries to construct hypotheses to support the possibility of each animal fall into nasty snark. Naish could have very easily kept a neutral tone (cryptozoologists' beliefs are ridiculous all on their own) and the book would have been better for it.

• Philip Reeve. The Roots of Evil. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). This, this! This is what classic Doctor Who was about! The Fourth Doctor and Leela (whose dress we don't have to see, because there are no images!) land on a Heligan Structure, a type of tree that grows in a planet's atmosphere to terraform it. But this one is different, for one it is enormous. Together, they must battle the tree's inhabitants hell bent on enacting generational vengance on him but also the tree itself, that has suddenly come to life and seems willing to kill everyone. Reeve writes in a style that echoes the campiness of Tom Baker-era DW. The tone is perfect.

• Patrick Ness. Tip of the Tongue. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrive in a small Massachussetts twon in 1945 when a new gadget has become all the rage. Truth Tellers are a device one attaches to one's mouth that always tells inconveniant and untold truths. The town is falling appart because of it. The Doctor, Nyssa and two of the town's most marginalized kids discover the sinister (and extra-terrestrial) plot behind what all the cool kids are doing. An interesting read, but it need not have been a Doctor Who story to make sense.

• Richelle Mead. Something Borrowed. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Sixth Doctor and Peri (whose accent we cannot hear, thankfully) land on the resort planet Koturia and are immidiately attacked by tiny pterodactyls. As expected, the Rani is involved. There is a wedding, double-crossing, Las Vegas-size hotels and a lot of running up and down stairs. Cute.

• Malorie Blackman. The Ripple Effect. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The entire universe has been completely rewritten. Hundreds of races that used to exist no longer do and hundreds that were once destroyed exist again. Oh, and the Daleks are a gentle, benevolent, philosopher race. The Doctor and Ace go to Skaro to visit the Dalek Academy and try to figure out what happened. An interesting conceit, even if Ace does not get to blow anything up. Yes, of course, it's all the Doctor's fault.

• Alex Scarrow. Spore. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Eighth Doctor, in action mode, lands in Nevada tracking a bio-engineered spore, designed to convert organic-matter to geo-form planets. Can he save Earth before everyone is turned into black goo? Of course he can, but it's the adventure that counts.

• Charlie Higson. The Beast of Babylon. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Ninth Doctor, in action mode, physically fights mysterious dual creature, while a young girl called Ali watches on. She decides that the big-eared stranger is her key to outer-space adventure. I particularly like how Higson introduces the fact this is not taking place on Earth.

I only have one of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary novella to read yet. After, on to something in French I think.