Some friendly ads for people who deserve it.
Frédéric Maffre, comics writer
Stern, with scripts by Frédéric Maffre and art by his brother Julien Maffre, is a brilliant offbeat western comics series, which I already had the opportunity to praise when the first two albums were released, here and here. Published by Dargaud, the five albums so far were released in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023 respectively.
Body Switchers is a webtoon series with scripts by Frédéric Maffre and art by Diana Mercolini, mixing science fiction and teen comedy (following the adventures of two high school students, a "popular girl" and a "nerd", who unfortunately find their souls transferred into each other's bodies, Freaky Friday style, and who investigate to find out how this untimely metempsychosis could have happened, and how to reverse it).
The episodes will be released periodically on this platform, the first three being free and already online:
Shanghaï, Justicier de quartier is a TV series project, developed by Frédéric Maffre and Frédéric Aklan, and adapted from their short film Shanghaï Pizza, portrait of a justicier (2008), featuring the comedy-drama adventures of a discount superhero. The pre-production of the pilot is currently the focus of a crowdfunding campaign, which you can join there.
[Update: project unfortunately closed on February 5, 2023 without having achieved its objectives.]
Marie-Louise Desage, singer (among others)
The Blue Daffodils, a heady jazz quartet, whose self-produced album Painful Pillows was released in 2010.
Driving La Nuit, an excellent pop band with some hints of jazz and rock, and a 100% poetry, relaxing and dreamy, which, in addition to the self-produced, self-titled album released in 2018, has also created some very pretty music videos for their singles "Birds", "The Rain" and "Driving La Nuit" The album also features a cover of my favorite song from the Blue Daffodils album, "White Lullaby".
Pleasure, a synthpop duo that features Marie's vital voice and the music of Charles Michaud. They made this video in particular, and the related song is available, with this one, on their EP released by Aztec Records in 2020.
Her musical output over the past two decades also includes a whole host of magnificent covers of jazz standards that she has recorded in concert halls, café-concerts, streets or squares, in France, in the United States. and in Canada, and which can be viewed at leisure on Youtube.
...and during the covid pandemic, she experimented with Youtube on her own, using few instruments (the most crucial one being her voice), for a trilogy of personal tunes, very acoustic and bucolic (but not always so), as well as an array of motley but always passionate and thrilling pop covers, including a hypnotic collaboration with a female dancer and another with a male dancer.
She is also a documentary filmmaker, developing a project she calls Histoire d'êtres. Like scriveners in the past, but in the shape of short films, she is hired by ordinary people to make documentaries about their close ones, or important moments in their lives and those of their families, etc.
As part of her project Histoires d'êtres, Marie directed Singuliers (2023), a very fascinating and touching medium-length documentary on the "Drama, Music and Dance" department of Lycée St Sernin in Toulouse, of which she followed the students for more than a year, to capture, with great empathy and pertinence, their everyday struggles, their disappointments and their hopes, what life brings them and what they bring to the world. Absolutely worth discovering at this address.
Émeline Jouve, American theatre scholar
An eminent and brilliant scholar of American theatre, particularly in relation to its politics, she has so far offered the world mainly the fascinating monograph Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion (2017), about the eponymous playwright and her central role in the emergence of modern and militant theater in early 20th century America, and the excellent and fascinating Avignon 1968 & le Living Theatre, Mémoires d'une Révolution (2018), a thrilling reconstruction of a very troubled time in the history of the Avignon festival, through a series of interviews with witnesses to the events (I praised this book in more detail here). Finally, the crucial role of the American experimental troupe called The Living Theatre in this particular story is explored further, and the study of the troupe is extended, in a third work entitled Paradise Now en paradis, Une histoire du Living Theatre à Avignon et après (1968/2018) and published in October 2022.
By the way, there are translations of some (very good) plays by Glaspell, were published in October 2023, with not only a foreword by the wonderful Emeline Jouve whom I was praising above, but also a no less remarkable translator named Aurélie Delevallée, a brilliant and extremely likable mind, who has written, among other things, very interesting pieces about US author Donald Barthelme (postmodernism's star writer).
Laurent Dencausse, singer/musician and writer
He is the author, with an ad hoc band called Random Koslow, of a lively rock album entitled A Never-Ending Fall, as well as a funny novel (which I reviewed here) entitled La Voltigeuse of Constantinople, and another, more serious one, called L'Automne où les arbres ne perdirent pas leurs feuilles. Both creations date from 2020. He also has a short story entitled "Le re-mort" published in this 2021 work co-edited by you-know-who.
Soizic Croguennec, historian
Anthony Rouxel, musician
In addition to her numerous articles and contributions to collective works, and the conferences she has given on these questions, this eminent specialist in the history of cross-cultural and social relations in regions of the Americas such as Mexico or Louisiana, has written Société minière et monde métis: Le centre-nord de la Nouvelle Espagne au XVIIIe siècle (2017), and will, hopefully, write many more!
This guitar hero from Saint-Nazaire and his bandmates have so far only posted a few scattered tunes on Youtube, and a long time ago with that, but it's so good that one hopes that he will find the time and the motivation to delight us with other compositions. In any case, here's his output so far.
Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, scholar and poet
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, scholar, poet and writer of fiction
Originally, she was an exciting scholar of English-speaking countries' literature, English linguistics, stylistics, the study of the intersections between literature and music/dance, whose writings on these different topics would be very difficult to synthesize in such a small space. She is now also officially a poet, as Interstices Editions published, her collections of poems Clés d'août, in 2020 (which is very much worth your while, as I argued here), and Déchants in 2023 (which is also fairly great, as I pointed out here). More recently, the publisher has also published a translation, by Nathalie, of some "selected poems" (Poèmes choisis) by German poet Lotte Kramer, whose works are thus translated into French for the first time.
An extraordinary figure in the Hong Kong literary scene, Tammy, who studied neo-Victorian literature at King's College in London, before working as a associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. She now lives in Paris, and has published two excellent collections of poems and a fascinating collection of short stories, a collection that mixes the two forms, a scholarly monograph adapted from her Ph.D dissertation (on the contemporary rewritings of Jane Eyre, Dracula and Charles Dickens), and she edits and co-edits several online literary, cultural and scholarly journals, including Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, which she co-founded.
Françoise Besson, scholar, poet, writer of fiction
Françoise Besson has written numerous scholarly works, and edited numerous multi-authored collections and issues of scholarly journals. She was the chief editor of the journal Caliban for many years. (She is also a translator (e.g., in 2023, she translated Going Away to Think//Voyager pour penser by US ecocritic Scott Slovic). So this won't be a comprehensive list of her writings here (especially since there is also plenty in terms of collections of poems and tales), but an overview, as tantalizing as possible, of her many books on English literature, travelogues, Gothic literature and Native American literature in particular, on nature, animals, and the protection of both, on the connections between literature and these ecological concerns; she has written or edited several works on mountains in general and the Pyrenees in particular, and she has also written a small monograph on Charlie Chaplin. In short, there are many beautiful things to discover in her universe made of hiking trails and wind blowing through the leaves.
