Amuse-bouches 2020-09-20

There are only 24 hours in a day («On peut pas être au four et au moulin»), and it turns out that every hour I spend writing about my French activities is an hour I don’t spend on doing those activities. Here’s a collection of brief items about French activities I’ve enjoyed recently but haven’t made time to write up until now.

Chagall: Scandale à l’Opéra de Paris

In a recent French lesson I was assigned to watch the short video named «Chagall: Scandale à l’Opéra de Paris». In 1962, artist Marc Chagall was commissioned to create a new painting on the ceiling of the Palais Garnier opera house. I first visited this building in 2013 and absolutely adored it. The main amphitheater is spacious and restful, and the grand staircase in the entryway is stunning. The Chagall ceiling is OK too.

Fred Vargas: Les Evangélistes

Fred Vargas is a well-known French author of detective novels (polar or rompol). She’s been writing since the mid-1980’s and continues to publish new works (I think Quand sort la recluse (2017) is her most recent work). I first came upon her work in 2013 in a Paris bookstore and like it enough to stock up on a bunch of her books that have sat on my shelf unread. When I finished Pietr-le-Letton I needed a next read, and my daughter randomly pulled Vargas’s Sans feu ni lieu from the shelf. It was super accessible (a big change from the Simenon), and I read it in just 10 days or so. It turns out that it’s the final book in a short trilogy, though they are really only loosely linked. So I went back and read the first book Debout les morts, and am now a couple chapters into the middle book, Un peu plus loin sur la droite. For some reason, the first and second books of the series are harder for me to read than the third: maybe her writing style changed, or something else is at work.

The common thread is a household of three historians and an ex-police officer. The historians are named Matthias, Marcus, and Lucien, and the officer christens them St. Matthieu, St. Mark, and St. Luke, or “the evangelists”. In the first book, these four are the primary protagonists and detectives. In the final book, the detective is Louis Kehlweiler, another former police detective who knows evangelists, who themselves appear only briefly. The start of Un plus loin features Kehlweiler again, so I’m expecting the historians will be scarce again. We’ll see.

Mots Fléchés

I enjoy crossword puzzles and am reasonably skilled at them in English. The New York Times daily puzzle only gets interesting for me on Thursday or so. I figured that French crossword puzzles would be a good way to exercise my brain and build vocabulary. That may be true (though crossword puzzle words are their own odd sub-domain), but I completely underestimated how much command of the language is required to do this task. En français, je suis nul en mots fléchés!

The kind of puzzles I’ve been working on are called «mots fléchés». They look something like this

They come rated in levels 0-7. Level 4 is completely beyond me. I took me months to get past level 0, and I’m now working my way through the booklet shown above, labeled level 1-2, which I picked up in a news kiosk in Bordeaux. I feel like I’m about at the point where it is transitioning from level 1 to level 2, and boy am I struggling. In the heart of level 1 I was was able to get through one or two per night reliably without a dictionary, but it would take me well over an hour. Now I’m at an hour or two to get 75% of a puzzle completed. Here’s my current grid:

The answers are all in the back of the booklet, so I’m only as stuck as I let myself be. Often the problem is not that I don’t can’t think of a word to match the clue, but that I just don’t know what the word in the clue means. Here, I think I know what the clue words mean, but perhaps not all the solution words. My knowledge of gourdes is limited, even in English.

You can find lots of print puzzles like this at  https://www.megastar.fr/fleches. If you click into each offering, each title offers a sample puzzle you can download like this, this, or this. They also sell printed booklets individually or by annual subscription. Six issues cost 25€, plus an additional 15€ for mailing to the US. I have enough supply to last me a while, so haven’t tried this yet. You can also play online with, for example, daily new grids at a variety of difficulties from the site Notre temps.

Les Hérietier

The French Cultural Center runs a film club that meets monthly to discuss in French films. I had hoped to attend the September session, which featured the 2014 film Les Heritiers. Not sure how they typically run things when not in the midst of a pandemic, but for this session we were asked to watch the film on our own in advance, then come prepared to discuss it in French. I watched the first 40 minutes of it before learning the Center had to reschedule the meeting for some reason or other. I couldn’t make the new time, so there was no longer any pressure for me to finish the film on time. That was a week ago, not sure if I’ll get back to it. I only understood 2/3 of the dialogue, and I didn’t find it all that engaging.

A Video Potpourri for La Rentrée

(A version of this article is cross-posted on the blog of the French Cultural Center of Boston.)

I grew up here in Massachusetts and studied French in middle and high school during the 1980s. Years later I discovered the French Cultural Center when preparing for a six-month job rotation to Paris. I’ve been a member and continuing student ever since.

Back in the 1980s I didn’t have much access to French video. Today what’s available in the US is staggering: TV series, YouTube shorts, long films, news, you name it. Though the pandemic has closed off many French learning options, there’s no shortage of videos to stream. They offer visual clues that help infer the meaning of speech, which then helps resolve what the words must have been. Many videos have French closed captions which help build listening skills as well. They cover a wide range of vocabulary and speaking styles, often using a more colloquial register than I find in books, newspapers, or even podcasts.

Here are some of my recent favorites. They vary in length, subject matter, and difficulty, but if you have a B1 or better level of oral comprehension there should be something here for you.

Mr Nouar

Mr. Nouar is a YouTube channel of short sketches about life in modern France by comedian Mohamed Nouar. They contain funny, sharp social commentaries on issues of discrimination, unemployment, race, family, dating, incompetence, love, les relations hommes-femmes. He’s been posting videos since 2014. Born in 1988 of Algerian parents in southwest France, Nouar’s work is full of multicultural twenty-somethings who talk fast, chat ironically, use slang, and revel in verbal jousting.

Available for free on YouTube.

Miraculous

https://youtu.be/oLfCpvgsDB0

Miraculous: les aventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir is a TV series for kids drawn in the Japanese anime style and broadcast from 2015 to 2019. Set in Paris, two young teen superheroes together battle the villain of the week. Meanwhile, their alter-egos conduct an awkward middle school flirtation, unaware of the other’s superhero life. The series has wholesome characters, non-stop dialogue, and simple stories whose predictability helps clue the meaning. Each 21-minute episode includes scenes from daily teen life (school, home, babysitting, subway, market, movie theater, etc.) as well as superhero battles. Though the intended audience is French kids ages 8-12, older students of French can benefit a lot from the series.

Full episodes available on Netflix, excerpts on the official YouTube channel.

Chiffroscope

Chiffroscope is a collection of 48 mini-documentaries (2-3 minutes each) that look at big questions of the day using statistics and irreverent animations. It’s an eclectic series, with topics like cannabis legalization, freedom of the press, money and happiness, overfishing, global chocolate consumption and danger from asteroids. The narrator’s delivery is clean but fairly fast, and there are many complicated numbers spoken aloud (e.g. 143,000) – good listening practice. Otherwise, the language is very accessible, as almost everything is in the present tense and the drawings reinforce the words.

Chiffroscope videos are available on YouTube on the channel «l’Effet Papillon».

Au Service de la France

Au Service de la France is a television series that paints an absurd picture of a French spy agency in the 1960s. Though set in the past, the show debuted in 2015 and is a vehicle for rather acerbic criticisms of French society today. It mocks French attitudes towards Algeria, the rest of Africa, the Cold War, women, and class. Fair warning: the series is hilarious, but intentionally shocking. Many characters say and do awful things designed to illustrate how far French society still has to go. Though cringe-inducing, it’s also a goldmine for studying French language and culture. Lots of things are said on screen that won’t be heard in more sanitized media. The language is challenging, but the French closed captions are quite faithful to the spoken French if you want an assist.

Available on Netflix under the name “A Very Secret Service”. Two seasons of 12 episodes, 25-minutes each.

Dix Pour Cent

Dix Pour Cent is another television series that offers a chance to expand your knowledge of modern French language and culture at the same time. Set in a present day Parisian talent agency, it follows four agents as they deal with landing projects for their touchy stable of stars. But there’s a gimmick: each episode features a guest star who plays themself. Famous French film names like Cecile de France and Michel Drucker are written into the scripts and get to poke fun at themselves or play off their established stereotypes. There are also long running plot arcs around the careers, love affairs, and family troubles of the four agents and their assistants. There’s plenty of familiar and colloquial language in the dialogue, including cursing, drinking, and talk of sex, but nothing discomfiting.

Available on Netflix under the name “Call My Agent!” Four seasons (2015-2020) of six episodes 50 minutes each. Select the original French audio, and either no subtitles or the French closed-captions.

Watching French video can be a great way to improve your French, but don’t be surprised if it takes more energy and focus than watching TV in English. Also, don’t be afraid to watch the same segment more than once, or to watch an entire episode with captions on and then again with captions off. If you add 15 minutes a day of French video watching to your routine, you’ll be sure to notice a big jump in your mastery in no time.

Bonne continuation!

Ansonia Wines, Zoom Tasting

I have the good fortune of living not far from Ansonia Wines, an excellent importer of small-batch, artisan French wines made by 40 winemakers around France. Although Ansonia has been in business for all 16 years I’ve lived in my current house, I placed my very first order with them (an introductory six-pack) just this summer. The wines were all quite up good, and they delivered to my house during the pandemic, so A+ for convenience. Their prices are generally $16 – $30 a bottle, with a few offerings higher than that. Especially with current tariffs in the US, this is quite reasonable for good French wine.

Last weekend I participated in an Ansonia organized, Zoom-mediated online wine-tasting and really enjoyed it. I’m not much of a wine expert, though I like drinking it and learning how it is made. I can count on the fingers of one hand the total number of wine-tastings I’ve ever attended, and the online Zoom aspect of it was a first for me. Apparently 40 people signed up in advance for the event, which featured five white wines from Bourgogne and the Loire valley.

Just before noon, Ansonia opened eight bottles of each and redistributed them into 40 sets of five five-ounce bottles. Customers (including me) came by the store between noon and 2pm to collect their bottles and put them in the fridge at home. The tasting started at 4pm over Zoom and lasted an hour. I set out my bottles and my laptop on the living-room coffee table and settled in for a pleasant afternoon goûter (my cheese and bread are out of the frame).

Here are the wines we tasted:

  1. Martin-Luneau Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine “Clisson” 2016
  2. Paget Chenin “Mélodie” 2018
  3. Garenne Sancerre “Bouffants” 2019
  4. Maillet Mâcon-Verzé 2017
  5. Collet Chablis 1er cru “Montmains” 2018

The tasting was conducted by Tom Wilcox, the younger member of this father-and-son (or rather Père et Fils) business. He had a prepared slide presentation with maps showing the region of France each wine was from, photographs of each specific vignoble, and often photos of the winemakers themselves talking with Mark Wilcox (père) (Tom is in the small picture-in-picture box at the top right of the laptop screen, while Mark Wilcox appears in the sweater-vest on the left half of the slide). Tom narrated the whole thing while directing viewers when to taste each wine, explaining the micro-climate, the soil, and the winemaking process that went into each wine.

The first three are from the lower-, middle-, and upper-Loire valley. The last two are from Bourgogne (Burgundy). The presentation contained these handy maps to show the sources more clearly:

Tom followed up with a pointer to a series of short YouTube videos by winemakers in Bourgogne talking about their wine, their work, and their history. Many of these videos are available both in French and in English. Here, for example, is Nicolas Maillet talking about his vineyard in Mâcon-Verzé:

En français …
and in English

The whole series of them can be found here: « Rendez-vous avec les vins de Bourgogne »

I’ve never been to Mâcon, but as it happens, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the other regions represented by the tasting. Here’s a few pictures I took in 2017 in Beaune, a part of Bourgogne just outside Dijon:

Château du Clos de Vougeot, Headquarters of the Climats de Bourgogne

The photo shows an old, no-longer used, massive press used to squeeze the juice out of grapes. An unknown tourist standing next to the press gives a handy reference for scale. The cisterns (cuve) that held the wine during fermentation are in the foreground, massive oak tanks with steel bands.

Of course, the outdoor scenery in Beaune is stunning, especially in the summer. Here’s an example:

A few years earlier (2014), I spent a couple weeks working in Paris and took a one-day weekend tour of the upper Loire which included a visit to a wine cave (Caves Duhard) and a tasting. Caves have very regular humidity and temperature, which makes the great for storing wine over long periods. Apparently, this has been known for centuries, and so when the stones were quarried for the châteaux that line the Loire, they were careful to leave usable caves behind. Really big ones. Here’s a few photos to give you an idea:

The major city at the mouth of the Loire is Nantes, which I visited in 2020. I didn’t travel to wine country, but I did encounter some really cool street art inspired by Jules Vernes, favorite son in those parts:

My other big wine encounter was a 2020 winery tour in St Emilion, but that’s in Bordeaux, so not rightly part of this weekend’s wine tasting. I’ll have to wait until Ansonia features a Bordeaux tasting to share that story…