Village Voice, in the Latin Quarter

I browsed around, didn’t know what to buy. It had to be a small book as I don’t want to carry heavy books around. So I picked this novel by Bernhard Schlink which I didn’t know anything about, only attracted by its size and the photo of Kate Winslett on the cover. Can you think of a more shallow way of choosing a book?
Well, I can’t, but it turned out to be the sort of book that I couldn’t put down, although it took me quite a while to read.

The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

I only realised that Bernhard Schlink was a German writer and that I could easily have bought a translation of the novel in French. But it doesn’t matter. I like reading in English, if only because I am a fast reader and books will last longer when I read in English.
So I started reading, knowing absolutely nothing about the book. I got totally sucked in and was led from one surprise to the next till the end of the story.
In case you haven’t heard anything about it, which is unlikely, I don’t want to mention anything that might be a spoiler.
I’ll just copy a short paragraph.

At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy nas no meaning whatever.

A must read.

Seen this afternoon, Election Day in the U.S., in Paris, this shopwindow, where they still had Halloween decorations on

Vote, vote, vote!

I hardly ever post anything about politics, but the whole world is looking at America, and so am I.

I turned sixty-four, (one of my favourite songs by the Beatles) last week and between the gifts, the get-together with my daughter and the walking, I have been pretty busy.
It’s been a year of change. It started badly, with having to admit that I did have high blood pressure, that my triglycerides were too high and my cholesterol out of order. Not to mention the pounds that had added up during the last… ten years. I didn’t mind the last so much, but the high blood pressure represented the first regular medicine I had to take. Talk about getting old.
Four years ago my body failed me when I found myself with breast cancer. But just when I started feeling that this was behind me, I had to accept a daily pill.
I must admit that I hate taking medicine and seeing doctors. So, this was a blow but when the doctor suggested that if I didn’t take the medication and if I didn’t try to mend my ways I’d be a good subject for CVA, I figured that it was time to do something.
There I was lucky, because I joined a programme, which, besides a thorough checkup, offered a three-day session, during which you were offered advice for starting up exercising and changing your way of eating.

My daily pill

So I did make a lot of changes to my way of life.
My goal at the time, was to stop taking my high blood pressure medication one day and to avoid having to take statins to fight cholesterol. Those two things may never happen, since my blood pressure is OK WITH the daily pill, and although triglycerides are back to normal, cholesterol is still a bit high.
But on the really positive side, I have rediscovered exercise!
As I am the queen of gadgets, I purchased a pedometer. And several pedometers later, here is the queen of pedometers, discovered by Sara, a faithful member of ElderExercise

The queen of pedometers for the queen of gadgets

And I started walking, and walking… and walking. And what seemed almost impossible at the beginning, has become my daily routine.
The doctor also prescribed brisk activity of some kind. I told you earlier about purchasing a reclining indoors bike, which, I must admit is OK. Except that I don’t enjoy pedalling as much as I enjoy being outdoors and walking. So I save the bike for really rainy days. And I must admit that ever since I got back from Normandy, I haven’t used it yet. But I know there’ll be days.
I do try my best to have at least three brisk walking sessions a week, –between 30 and 40 mn each–, four sessions the weeks I am lucky
Another thing I do is record my daily progress on my Google calendar, for my record and also at ElderExercise, one of Naomi‘s brilliant ideas.
I am also having a one-hour weekly Feldenkrais session, but I did that before starting the programme, and have added a stretching session, which has done me a lot of good.
I have added a weekly splash at the swimming-pool and hope this good resolution will hold out throughout the winter…

This has had the most wonderful effects on my mood and on my health. I have gone down from size 20 to size 16, and I am not out of breath when I climb up stairs any longer. I used to complain about joint pains all the time, and although they are still here when I get up in the morning, they subside as soon as I get moving. Quite a lot has happened since I wrote this post, back in August 2006

At the top of Durham Cathedral

So should I thank cholesterol and high blood pressure?

The down side of all this is that I can’t keep up with everything. In other words, you have noticed that I am not as faithful a commenter on your blogs as I used to be and that I don’t post much on my own blogs. Off walking

It can’t be the first time I entitle a post ‘Time flies’. Well, the older I get, the more I feel it. Is it because I am slower, or because I like taking up new things with new toys?
Is it the (almost) daily exercise? It might be a bit of all these things put together.
I just realised that I still have photographs that I took last summer in Manchester, and that I haven’t processed, sorted out or uploaded yet.
And there’s this new toy I got that takes up a lot of my time.

My brand new Flip Ultra Video

and the time it takes to process the video clips I take with it
So of course, I try to combine everything together,

All set to do Word Time 6 and bike at the same time

Or I walk and use my Flip while walking.

Because of flickr video feature, I have gone through the photos I have accumulated through the years and fished out a few clips that I took with my video camera and am trying to tame iMovie to edit them and upload them.
Like this one I took last September with my Lumix FZ8, when I went to Chaumont sur Loire with my friend Sarah.

In a hammock with Sarah*

I have no idea where my second foot had disappeared, but I swear it was there.
So between one thing and another, I just don’t have much time for blogging, although I am also posting once a week at ElderExercise.
I do try to read blogs as much as I can, but that’s still not much! Sorry about this.

* The music is an extract of Franz Schubert’s Sonata in B flat performed by David H. Porter, copyright free music (public domain music).

This is just to let you know that I’m back home after a great eight-day trip, with wi-fi indeed, but not in my room. So the only thing I did was check my mail and certainly had no time for blogging.

Leo and Elly are wonderful guides to their native Norfolk and we went through churches, cemeteries, zoos, aquariums and museums (I’m sure I am forgetting a few things!) not to mention a wonderful performance of Brahms German Requiem at the church of St Peter Mancroft and a great evening at the Theatre Royal where I enjoyed Cats and meeting Elly’s Mum, a great lady!

I took loads and loads of photos and will be uploading them on flickr, some of them being already there.

And sorry to have missed a weekly episode of my Wednesday Window!

In the course of my recent stay in hospital, I was advised to go for longer walks to get my daily dose of exercise and, three times a week, to add a 20 minutes fast-walking period in the course of those walks.

So far so good. In fact, I find that it stimulates me and it’s been relatively easy to comply for the last week or so, because it hasn’t been raining at all.

Last Wednesday, I crossed Jardin des Tuileries which extends from Place de la Concorde to Le Louvre. I found it amazing that this is what it looked like at 12:01 pm

Empty and misty

and exactly 5 minutes later not exactly from the same vantage point, but pretty close,

Crowds rushing towards Le Louvre or Place de la Concorde

Probably rushing to lunch!
The only thing that I find difficult in my new programme, is to find room to blog, as I keep one blog in English and one blog in French, and even more difficult to come and visit you on your blogs.

So please forgive me, and give me some time to get more organised!

It’s been a while since I visited the exhibition dedicated to Soutine at Pinacothèque de Paris, where I had never been before. A strange place for a Pinacothèque, in my opinion, but I guess we Parisians will get used to it. Strange, because seen from outside, it looks more like some store than like an art exhibition. Actually, I’m wondering if it didn’t use to be a store like Hédiard. Anyway, the layout is also strange as the rooms are rather small, full of nooks and crannies, and you have to go up and down stairs quite a lot, part of the exhibition being in the basement.
I found the lighting peculiar too, as you always have to stand on the side of a painting, if you want to avoid unwanted reflections, which in the end has several persons standing on the right or on the left of a painting.

This said, I hope I haven’t turned you off the place, because I really loved this particular exhibition.
As I mentioned before, when I visited the Gustave Courbet retrospect, I am an almost complete ignoramus when it comes to art and painting, but since I’ve grown old, I am quite willing to amend my ways. I knew, of course, Soutine’s name, and could have placed him in the 20th centure, but had hardly seen any painting of his. In fact, I do remember seeing reproduction of his art when I was a school-girl but they didn’t impress me much as they were black and white!
Now Soutine is anything BUT black and white. I loved the burst of colours and crazy shapes. Colours, shapes, movement, I really discovered a powerful artist and wouldn’t mind going back to see more and digest it. I don’t know whether it was me, but I kept spotting faces in all the paintings, not only in portraits, but in landscapes.
The commentaries on the exhibition walls makes a big deal of the fact that Chaim Soutine was Jewish, and characterized him as a typically Jewish artist, but apart from the fact that he WAS Jewish, I can’t see what is so very Jewish about him. I can see calling Chagall’s art Jewish, but Soutine! Well, again, I am rather ignorant at art, so I won’t say any more.
I went several times through the gallery.
I absolutely loved La Folle (the madwoman) and Cérêt, les grands arbres bleus, Le Violoncelliste
(the Cellist), and my favourite was definitely Mistral, Paysage avec figures, and unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a link to the painting.

The exhibition was prolonged till March 3rd, 2008, and if you get a chance, you should definitely visit it.

You can download the press release for the exhibition here

As I haven’t taken any photos, I thought you might like this slideshow I found on YouTube

H

ow had I never heard of or read about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a book that was published in France in 1997 –Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, really surprises me. Some time ago, Joared at Along the Way, mentioned it to me and a couple of weeks later, I received a mail asking me if I had read it or seen the movie. So I looked it up and found that I was probably the only French person not having at least heard of it.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir by French Elle magazine editor-in-chief, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who had a massive stroke and found himself with the locked-in syndrome, totally conscious of what was going on around him, but unable to communicate, except by blinking one of his eyelids.
And blinking one of his eyelids was the way he dictated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Letter by letter.

When thinking of a possible stroke, most people immediately fear the idea of becoming a vegetable. But this is much worse as Bauby knows exactly what is happening to him.

While I have become something of a zombie father, Théophile and Célest are very much flesh and blood, energetic and noisy. I will never tire of seeing them walk alongside me, just walking, their confident expressions masking the unease weighing on their small shoulders. As he walks, Théophile dabs with a Kleenex at the thread of saliva escaping my closed lips. His movements are tentative, at once tender and fearful, as if he were dealing with an animal of unpredictable reactions. As soon as we slow down, Céleste cradles my head in her bare arms coers my forehead with noisy kisses and says over and over, “You’re my dad, you’re my dad,” as if in incantation.

And of course, you want to stop reading, you find it almost unbearable, and yet, this book is written with such gusto, such humour and self-derision that even though you know pretty much how it is going to end, you just read on.

Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely know. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language. Just now I am struggling with the letter l , a pitiful admission for an editor in chief who cannot even pronounce the name of his own magazine. On good days, between coughing fits, I muster enough energy and wind to be able to puff one or two phonemes. On my birthday, Sandrine managed to get me to pronounce the whole alphabet more or less intelligibly. I could not have had a better present.

A movie, starring Mathieu Amalric, was made, by Arthur Schnalbel, a movie I missed when it was released in France, last June, but here’s the trailer

I’ll be looking for the DVD.
But do read the book. Incidentally, I read it in English and it’s an excellent translation by Jeremy Legatt.

1. A review of the movie at Ripple Effects

So that you know, everything’s alright on this side of the pond.
I just feel like having a couple of days off from the blog(s)

But I wish you all a happy Christmas and thought you might enjoy this short cartoon that I found at Peggy’s Day to Day Life of a Very Lazy Gardener
Enjoy!

I have no idea why it took me so long to write about this movie that I saw almost a month ago. Maybe because writing anything about a movie is always a lengthy process, as you have to look for links and and such.
Anyway, this was a movie I had been looking forward to, in spite of the fact that it was a movie by Wong Kar Wai, the director of In the Mood for Love, which I had found boring.
Why then was I looking forward to seeing it? Well, for one, I am a fan of Jude Law, who I find irresistible, and I also tremendously like Norah Jones and was curious to see what sort of an actress she would turn out to be.

And I guess I also thought the title was quite mysterious, and couldn’t imagine what it was about.
I must say I found the movie enthralling, a poetic road movie, full of mauve, red and blueberry colours, like the blueberry pies that Elizabeth/Norah has at the diner kept by Jeremy/Jude, a diner by the name of kliutch, which in Russian means key.
Jeremy has a whole jar full of keys left by customers and Elizabeth, who has just found out about her lover being with another woman will leave her keys to the man’s flat there.
Anyway, the atmosphere and the way the story is filmed together with a collection of interesting characters Elizabeth will meet during her trip through America, all excellent actors, before going back to Klioutch, kept me really interested. The original soundtrack is great and I wholeheartedly recommend the movie.
Everyone else probably knew that, but I didn’t. I discovered that Norah Jones was Ravi Shankar‘s daughter.
I wish I could remember what year it was that I went to a marvellous concert, performing Ravi Shankar! What I do remember is the quality of the music and the almost religious way in which we were listening…