…f worth reading and mulling on. -Edroxy (Roxanne) has a series on French Female Writers Through the Centuries: her latest review is of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women, here. Whole series is worth reading, but this has some interesthing thoughts about NDiaye herself, and her sense of identity, or “truncated mixity” as she calls it, and handling what people expect her to write vs what she actually writes. -Nancy Fulda on Readers, Feedback and Good…

…cháo (rice porridge) was worth a laugh or two (I mangled the pronunciation completely, but enough of it got across that I basically got a custom dish made up for me). [2] Incidentally, if anyone knows of a festival that happens to fall on Feb 8th/the 17th day of the First Lunar Month, we’d be interested. We were mildly curious at the queue of pilgrims outside the Quan Vũ/Guan Yu temple in Hội An, and we couldn’t figure out why they’d be there (I k…

…e terms. Yup. Scary scary. That’s all I had. Next: pictures, and I’ll stop complaining, promise. [1] I’ll grant them one charitable intent, which is that they might be aiming this at French people who were in Indochina while it was still a colony. However, you have to realise that Vietnam became nominally independent from France in 1954, and that I don’t know when the renaming of stuff took place (offhand, juding from my bare-bones knowledge of hi…

…ks, and the more towards the centre we moved, the less I could make myself understood. I could sort of fake it in Hội An (to the point that when I asked for the bill it was presented to me in Vietnamese, cueing a “er, how much is ba mươi hai in English/French/convenient other language” [1]), but Huế was markedly worse. Thank God, we didn’t go any further North… Also, I can’t really understand people (I catch words here and there, mainly from conte…

…iety. The other GOH is astronomer Marek Kukula. I’m also likely to hang around in London for the weekend (basically, I want to avoid getting up early and returning late, so I’m looking into being there Sunday as well). More details as I have them. (PS: as some of you on FB and Twitter know, I jammed my right hand in a steel-reinforced door. I’m currently typing with my left hand and an index finger, so I’m not exactly fast on my feet at the moment…

…Going to Worldcon? Thanks to Nancy Fulda at AnthologyBuilder, I’ll be handing out shiny badges like this… For more details, see here. Several authors are involved, most notably T.L. Morganfield and Vaughan Stanger. Collect all the badges, and win a prize!…

…ly sure they’re books I’d hand to my children. Every single nationality around the globe basically got skewered in a racist fashion (including but not limited to Africans, Arabs, Asians, Gypsies–you name it, he skewered it), and it’s very much boys’ adventures–wimmen need not apply. There are other BDs from my childhood that are far, far better than those. Also, this quote? there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & h…

I’m going much better now: the fingers are mostly not swollen anymore, and all I have left are biggish bruises on the fingertips (which make typing all but impossible, but at least I can flex my fingers). The flipside of hurting my hand goes as follow: -Basic language test: I basically switched to English the entire time the H and I were dealing with the (minor) emergency, and only switched back to French once my hand was safely bandaged. So, app…

…n of Eastern and Western (see the octogonal pavillion vs the crosses that line the terraces). Inside, it looks a lot like a Vietnamese Versailles, with lots of ornate ceramics on the walls, and it has a golden likeness of the Emperor (the actual body is somewhere under the palace) and a shrine to honour his memory. That’s all from me–tommorrow it’s back to novel brainstorming and cooking 🙂…

…… is that, even while getting home relatively late, there’s still a good half hour of wonderful sun to enjoy while walking in a park. *happy writer*…