Archive for Rue Mouffetard
Saint-Joseph [Domaine Bernard Gripa]
Posted in Travel, Wines with tags Côtes du Rhône, French wines, restaurant, Rhone-Alpes, Rue Mouffetard, Saint-Joseph, white wine on January 20, 2024 by xi'an
a journal of the conquest, war, famine, and death year
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Austria, book review, books, Casa de Papel, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, dark fantasy, film review, Hallstatt, heist, izayaka, Journal of the Plague Year, Kherson, Korean cinema, North Korea, Patrick Dewdney, restaurant review, Rue Mouffetard, Russian invasion, Ukraine, Vladimir Mayakovski, Vladivostok on July 11, 2023 by xi'an
Read Les chiens et la charrue (Le cycle de Syffe, tome 3 ) by Patrick K. Dewdney, which came out after a long hiatus (esp. when missing the parution in September 2021!). It thus proved hard to remember the complex structure of this universe, as well as the names of characters from the earlier volumes. But after one slow third of the book, including an endless river slog, the right pace set in and I read the remaining 400 pages quite quickly (the trip to Jeddah helped!), with a climactic ending, despite a few too many coincidences. Looking forward the next tome, next year maybe?! While still being stuck in the (disappointing) last tome of Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor, I read another Max Gladstone’s, Dead Country (The Craft War I), within a few days, despite some weaknesses in the style (heavy infodump disguised as teacher/pupil conversations) and in the story. Unsure I will pursue this series.
Had an enjoyable early dinner at Otto, a Rue Mouffetard izayaka. Despite some highlights of the menu being unavailable, the remaining dishes were worth the visit! (And the bet that there would be a table available on a warm Saturday evening.)
Watched Korean Money Heist, which, I am told, is the K clone of La Casa de Papel (I had not watched). Very light and requiring a high tolerance for unlikely so unlikely twists, but with very good actors who managed to keep the pace till the last episode. With a appearance supposedly of the martyr city of Kherson, even though it is actually Hallstatt, Austria. (Just why would a North Korean student read Mayakovski’s poems in a Latin language while in Vladivostok?!)
the snow geese [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Antarctica, Baffin Island, Inuits, Rue Mouffetard, snow geese, William Fiennes on May 21, 2016 by xi'an Just as for the previous book, I found this travel book in a nice bookstore, Rue Mouffetard, after my talk at Agro, and bought it [in a French translation] in prevision for my incoming trip to Spain. And indeed read it while in Spain, finishing it a few minutes before touching ground in Paris.
“The hunters wolfed down chicken fried steaks or wolfed down cuds of Red Man, Beech-Nut, Levi Garrett, or Jackson’s Apple Jack”
The Snow Geese was written in 2002 by William Fiennes, a young Englishman recovering from a serious disease and embarking on a wild quest to overcome post-sickness depression. While the idea behind the trip is rather alluring, namely to follow Arctic geese from their wintering grounds in Texas to their summer nesting place on Baffin Island, the book itself is sort of a disaster. As the prose of the author is very heavy, or even very very heavy, with an accumulation of descriptions that do not contribute to the story and a highly bizarre habit to mention brands by groups of three. 
And of using heavy duty analogies, as in “we were travelling across the middle of a page, with whiteness and black markings all around us, and geese lifting off the snow like letters becoming unstuck”. The reflections about the recovery of the author from a bout of depression and the rise of homesickness and nostalgia are not in the least deep or challenging, while the trip of the geese does not get beyond the descriptive. Worse, the geese remain a mystery, a blur, and a collective, rather than bringing the reader closer to them. If anything is worth mentioning there, it is instead the encounters of the author with rather unique characters, at every step of his road- and plane-trips. To the point of sounding too unique to be true… His hunting trip with a couple of Inuit hunters north of Iqualit on Baffin Island is both a high and a down of the book in that sharing a few days with them in the wild is exciting in a primeval sense, while witnessing them shoot down the very geese the author followed for 5000 kilometres sort of negates the entire purpose of the trip. It then makes perfect sense to close the story with a feeling of urgency, for there is nothing worth adding.
