Off to France
January 26th, 2014 | Uncategorized
I’m going to Paris, then to the Angoulême Festival International de la Bande Desinée. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come to one of my events!
Tuesday/Mardi 28 Janvier, 19h, I will be at Violette and Co, the women’s bookstore in Paris.
Wednesday/Mercredi 29 Janvier, 19h, I will be at Les Arpenteurs, 9 Rue Choron, Paris.
Then I’m off on the very fast train to the Angoulême festival. I’ll be spending lots of time at the Éditions Denoël stall, signing books, or hoping to sign books.
On Friday at 19h, I’ll be in the Salle Bunuel to do some kind of presentation or interview or other.
My book Are You My Mother? or rather, C’est Toi Ma Maman? is one of the official selections of the festival, which is awesome, so there’s another event having to do with that on Saturday. And on Sunday I think I’m doing a joint interview with one of my favorite French cartoonists, the brilliant and brooding Fabrice Neaud.
I hope to see you at one of these things!
10 Responses to “Off to France”
Hey I hope your high school French comes in handy! Who was the French teacher? I can’t remember. Wish I could be there.
Yeah, I was going to ask how your French is, and whether you’re going to speak French a lot yourself at these events or rely on the services of a translator. Oh wow, all of a sudden I’m imagining DTWOF strips in French (even though this isn’t about that). That’d be awesome to see…!
bon voyage! and I hope I get to see you amidst the crowd
…
are you planning to come to Spain?
Christa Wolf — you will know her from A MODEL CHILDHOOD,
her memoir of girlhood and adolescence in the parts of Germany that
became Polish after the Second World War, the collapse of her
family’s life, their flight to the West, her accommodation as a
newly convinced socialist with what it was to have been a member of
the German Girls’ Group… well. At any rate — published in 2003
her EIN TAG IM JAHR, One Day A Year, a memoir that consisted of her
diary entries over forty years of September 27ths. A posthumous
volume continued matters through the second decade of German
unification, the decade in which clearer and clearer became to her
who had been a beacon among East German writers — My time is past.
I wept reading it. The first is available in English, the second…
not yet. She earned the Nobel that went to Guenter Grass, fatly
self-satisfied bloated judgemental safe-in-the-West Guenter Grass.
When you take on your own One Day A Year, read hers.
From the website of Violette & Co — tomorrow’s
offering (mardi 28 janvier 2014) — Alison Bechdel, passagère. Not
sojourner; transient, momentary. Alison Bechdel, de passage. And
the bargepole-length of safe distance kept from life in lesbian
serial monogamy! Ah, the French. “Rencontre-signature avec ALISON
BECHDEL, de passage à Paris, pour son roman graphique ” C’est toi
ma maman ?” – 19h “Trad. de l’anglais (États-Unis) par Corinne
Julve et Lili Sztajn qui seront présentes à la rencontre ainsi que
l’éditeur Jean-Luc Fromental. “Fun Home, son précédent livre qui
vient d’être réédité avec une nouvelle couverture, chef-d’œuvre
d’introspection familiale, élargissait le territoire du roman
graphique. Avec C’est toi ma maman ?, nouvelle plongée dans
l’alchimie fondatrice des êtres, de leur conscience, de leur
sexualité, Alison Bechdel apporte une profondeur inconnue. Son père
était le sujet du premier livre, une “tragicomédie familiale”.
Cette fois, avec ce “drame comique”, elle tourne le scanner
ravageur de sa lucidité et de son humour vers sa mère : lectrice
vorace, mélomane invétérée, ardente actrice amateur. Mais aussi,
épouse infortunée d’un gay du placard, mère dont les aspirations
artistiques ont bouleversé l’existence de sa fille, mais qui a
cessé de la toucher et de l’embrasser à l’âge de sept ans. Là où
James Joyce et Proust étaient les anges tutélaires du premier
livre, ce sont les figures de Virginia Woolf, du pédopsychiatre
Donald Winnicott et de l’extraordinaire auteur pour enfants D.
Seuss, qui illuminent cette traversée des gouffres mère-fille,
prétexte pour Bechdel à revisiter les replis d’une enfance
singulière, les tourments d’une artiste à la poursuite de la vérité
et les errements d’une vie amoureuse lesbienne de
serial-monogame.”
Goodnight Pete Seeger, goodnight. (… goes back to her own
“tourments d’une artiste” …)
A time to be born, a time to die. A time to laugh, a time to weep…
Hope I’ll have a chance to say a few words in English.
Would be to happy to meet you anyway ! Beatrice. One of the Prune Janvier team, twenty years ago : “Lesbiennes à suivre”
A.B. takes the Continent by storm! 🙂 Hey, hairball… I’m
trying to track down something I saw on the internet machine last
week about a lock-down order for our old haunt, the University of
Oklahoma campus. The message specifically said, “Avoid Gould Hall”.
Yikes, I used to have my office in the basement of that building!
🙁