Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 14

La brune habillée en soie

Towards the end of the summer, I went through another French Canadian music phase, this time focused on albums by De Temps Antan, including À l’année, Les habits de papiers, and Consolez-vous. I came across the song “La brune habillée en soie” (The brunette dressed in silk), which I quite liked and also reinforced my impression that there is really only one Québécois song, and all songs express facets of that one ur-song. Actually, the most significant overlap I can detect is between “La brun...

San Francisco II

Earlier in October, I went up to San Francisco for the weekend. The reason for the trip was to give a talk in the Berkeley Linguistics Department, but it was an excellent excuse to spend time in a city I like more and more. I arrived on Friday evening and met my friend Dustin for dinner. The place where we met was a stone’s throw from the Chinese restaurant where the banquet I went to before the premiere of Dream of the Red Chamber was held, but we ate at a different Chinese restaurant, which...

Summer’s End in Minnesota

At the end of my summer, which for the rest of the world is mid-to-late September, I went to Minnesota and brought Isabelle along. We visited the cats at Wild Rumpus in Linden Hills.

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We stumbled upon the Highpoint Center for Printmaking on Lake Street and saw the juried print exhibition and Michael Kareken’s black-and-white watercolor monotypes of majestic forests in the Pacific Northwest.

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With my brother, we visited Minneapolis’s first cat café, Café Meow! We met a very sweet cat named Ore...

hapa.me

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Yesterday I went to the Japanese American National Museum to see Kip Fulbeck’s exhibit hapa.me: 15 years of the hapa project. I’ve blogged about what hapa means before and also about seeing Kip Fulbeck at the LA Times Festival of Books in 2017. For this exhibit, Fulbeck took new photographs of the participants in the original Hapa Project and again asked them to respond to the prompt, What are you? The result is about 40 double portraits separated in time by fifteen years, accompanied by the...

Turkish Editions

The Turkish editions of Sparkers and Wildings have been out for a while, but only recently did I get my hands on some copies, thanks to both my publisher and a family friend who regularly visits Turkey. The books are pretty!

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There are also Sparkers bookmarks and Kırmızı Kedi bookmarks!

I also saw that How to Tell If You’re in an X Novel meme, inspired by The Toast, going around on Twitter (where I sometimes lurk unofficially), and Isabelle helped me come up with my own list:

How to Tell You...

A Couple of Recent Links

Sparkers and Wildings have popped up in a couple of places recently:

First, A Mighty Girl included Sparkers on the list “No Romance Required: 30 Books About Girl-Boy Friendships.” For what it’s worth, Wildings would be at home on that list too.

Second, Northwest Asian Weekly featured Wildings in a piece on books by Asian authors that encourage questioning the status quo. And as the review notes, Sparkers also falls into that category.

Village Churches and Roman Ruins

In which I conclude the chronicle of my travels in southern France (you can also read the first part).

Tuesday

After sending my brother on his way back to the U.S., we visited the village of La Louvière-Lauragais, which has a population of around 50. There is an old church with an unusual belltower and apparently a Black Virgin, though we didn’t get to see it. I marveled again at the ornate interiors of tiny village churches tucked away in the countryside.

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The slate tiles and belltower of the...

Adventures in Cathar Country

On the last Friday in June, I flew from Paris to Toulouse, where I met up with my parents and brother. We visited the Basilique Saint-Sernin, which has an impressive belltower and, inside, a lot of banners about the wonders of pilgrimage. Then we walked around a bit–Toulouse is quite pretty, and it has street signs in Occitan!–and ate dinner at a restaurant where I tried skate for the first time. I was curious after all the rays I’d seen at aquariums lately. We then drove to Mazères, where th...

Paris

After the conference in Lisbon, I spent most of the last week of June with Isabelle in Paris. I hadn’t been to Paris, or to France, since 2011, when I studied abroad in Grenoble, and it was wonderful to be back. We stayed with Isabelle’s parents in their apartment in the 16e arrondissement. Forthwith, the highlights:

Sunday

With Isabelle’s partner Olivier, we went to visit our old haunts in the Latin Quarter. First we got off at my old metro stop, and I successfully led us to the apartment bu...

Lisbon, Part II

In which I conclude the chronicle of my trip to Lisbon (you can also read Part I).

Friday

Meng and I got up bright and early to take the metro and then the train to Belém, farther west along the Tagus. We arrived at Pastéis de Belém, home of the original pastéis, long before the crowds and in time for a lovely breakfast. I had a small cup of thick, rich hot chocolate and most of a plain croissant, and of course we tried the famous pastéis. In terms of quality, it was about the same as the fir...