Culture – Page 2 – Monsieur Miller

2021-08-13

Summer Lessons Day 11: Concordance des temps, Langage familier

Wednesday’s lessons were with Sofia once again, and as before we covered a ton of ground. We reviewed that bête noir of advanced grammar the Concordance of Tenses, and also looked at indefinite determinants. We also did a bit of reading comprehension around French beliefs in pseudo-sciences and bogus medicine. But the majority of the time was spent on oral comprehension of more difficult language: fast, informal, mumbled, and even (gasp!) Québecois! Oh, and we did another timed writing exercise to round it out.

Grammar first: when I hear “indefinite determinant”, I usually think of a matrix with a mix of positive and negative eigenvalues. But that’s not what we studied during the lesson. Instead we looked at words like “some”, “few”, “most”, “all”, or “no” – words which give a vague sense of quantity without being specific: “Few children like spinach”. If you think about it for a moment, it’s obvious to English speakers that there’s a natural order of these: “no” < “few” < “some” < “most” < “all”. There’s likely other words you could fit in there somewhere as well (e.g. “several”, “many”).

How about in French? That was the subject of the mini-lesson on indefinite determinants. French has the added wrinkle of using different words for singular concepts and plural collections. Here’s the rough ordering for singular quantities:

{aucun, nul, pas un} < {un, l’autre} < {quelque, quelconque} < certain < maint < { chaque, tout }

For plural quantities, there’s other words like «divers», «différents», and «plusieurs» that figure in the mix as well. I didn’t quite catch all the nuances on when to use the singular version and when the plural version, but interesting and worth more study.

After the grammar work it was on to oral comprehension. We started with a video about the painting “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Peter Paul Rubens. The original is in the Prado museum in Spain, but YouTuber Manon Bril has a poster on her apartment wall. When she made this video, Bril was still a PhD student in modern history and writing a thesis on the portrayal of Athena in the 19th century (explained in only 180 seconds here). But she already had a side gig of making videos about famous artwork. Her style is irreverent, fast, choppy, and with a lot of asides, so it’s a decent challenge to understand. I was helped by the recent popularity of the musical Hadestown, though it took me forever to figure out that “AH-dess” was the French pronunciation of Hades (“HEY-dees” in my dialect).

Next up was a long journalistic piece about whether Instagram photos, and specifically the wide spread use of photo filters and photo manipulation apps like Facetune, are driving people to make more changes their actual bodies. Apparently, ordinary people are not only getting unhappy that they don’t look like the glamorous celebrities they see on TV or the internet, they are getting unhappy about not looking like the modified selfies that they themselves create and post to social networks. Having gotten used to the doctored photos, they now go to the doctor to augment their bodies. That all sounds pretty terrible to my ears, but it sounds even worse when explained in a thick Québecois accent. And worse still, when discussed by Québecois students at community college with bad microphones and no training in communications. Quite a listening challenge for me.

After discussing what I did and didn’t understand from the Instagram story, it was time for written production! Same conditions as before: 25 minutes, no tools or reference works, 250 words. The prompt was «Selon toi, qu’est-ce qui construit l’idéal de beauté d’une société? Penses-tu que notre idée de la beauté a tendance à s’harmoniser? Pourquoi?» (“In your opinion, who dictates the notion of beauty in a society? Do you think our ideas of tend to converge? Why?”) Here’s my response, together with Sofia’s corrections (I didn’t do any further self-correction after the 25 minutes were up).

Version originale

Quand on parle de la beauté, on pense souvent des idées, ou philosophiques ou artistiques. Mais en outre il y a aussi des phenomène moins raffinés: la puissance politique, la commerce, et la communautarisme. Un partie de ces dynamiques pousse en direction d’harminosation, mais une autre part pousse vers la diversité.

Dans les société aristocratiques, les nobles ou les gens de haute classes s’ornent avec les vêtements distincts, les perruques, le maquillage, etc. C’est un manière d’afficher leurs richesses, mais ça devient un standard pour la beauté. Souvent les gens dans la classe moyen essaient d’imiter cette mode soit pour faire entrer dans la société de la classe haute, soit pour emprunter pour eux-même le parfum de pouvoir. Évidement les nobles et les riches sont tous beaux, et ainsi cet imitation des nobles pèse vers l’uniformité de l’idéal.

En revanche, il y a souvent des mouvement politiques en opposition et dont le sentiment contrarien jaille au niveau aesthetique. Donc ils forment leurs propres idéal de beauté qui existe justement pour les differencier avec les élites. De cette manière chaque communauté genère une nouvelle idée de la beauté.

Enfin, au fond de tout est toujours l’argent. Les commerçants ont deux strategème possible. On peut déclarer: «Vous devez acheter ceci et cela pour être beau, tout le monde le fait.» Ou …

Version corrigée

Quand on parle de la beauté, on pense souvent à des idées, soit philosophiques soit artistiques. Mais en outre il y a aussi des phénomènes moins raffinés: la puissance politique, la commerce, et la communautarisme. Une partie de ces dynamiques pousse en direction de l’harmonisation, mais une autre part pousse vers la diversité.

Dans les sociétés aristocratiques, les nobles ou les gens de la haute bourgeoisie s’ornent avec des vêtements distincts, des perruques, du maquillage, etc. C’est une manière d’afficher leurs richesses, mais ça devient un standard pour la beauté. Souvent les gens dans la classe moyenne essaient d’imiter cette mode soit pour faire entrer dans la société de la classe supérieure, soit pour emprunter pour eux-même le parfum de pouvoir. Évidemment les nobles et les riches sont tous beaux, et ainsi cette imitation des nobles pèse vers l’uniformité de l’idéal.

En revanche, il y a souvent des mouvements politiques en opposition et dont le sentiment contraire rejaillit au niveau esthétique. Donc ils forment leurs propres idéaux de beauté qui existent justement pour les différencier des élites. De cette manière chaque communauté genère une nouvelle idée de la beauté.

Enfin, au fond de tout est toujours une question d’argent. Les commerçants ont deux stratagèmes possibles. On peut déclarer: «Vous devez acheter ceci et cela pour être beau, tout le monde le fait.» Ou …

You don’t have to look too closely to notice I made tons of errors around the masculine / feminine gender of nouns. Sofia says the best way to practices that is with any of innumerable online quizzes. Just a few minutes each day, she proposes. I prefer to be lazy and just read and listen a whole bunch more, but she’s probably right.

Last order of the day: identify and understand spoken slang! I found this pretty much impossible. Here’s a short sketch about a patient who visits the doctor to try to get an excuse note for work, when in fact he’s perfectly well. The doctor sees this everyday and tries to make the visit as onerous as possible. Here’s just a small sample of the words and expressions that I was supposed to catch, but which totally went over my head:

«se bouger le cul»: se dépêcher
«un branleur»: un fainéant
«la flemme»: un manque d’envie
«s’être blindé»: avoir réviser sur un sujet

Note that «blindé» by itself just means “very rich”, which is not the same as «s’être blindé»

It’s always good to know one’s limits, and I’ve pretty clearly hit mine. I guess that’s what separates a student in a C1 French course from a student ready for level C2.

2021-08-12

Summer Lessons Day 10: Enchaînement and Bandes Annonces

Lessons with ILA continued today with Léonard, whom I worked with for the first time today. After a short get-to-know-you discussion, we moved on to an exercise (freely available) from TV5Monde centered around a short video sketch: Illustre inconnue (unrelated to a 2014 film of the same name). It’s a cute farce about an aspiring actress and a scheme gone wrong. It shared a lot of the vocabulary with Dix Pour Cent, which helped my comprehension.

Next we dove into a grammar topic I found extremely helpful, how to link ideas in an essay / speech / argument (l’enchaînement des idées). He presented these grouped by their function.

Expressions that mark an enumeration: d’abord, premièrement, en premier lieu; ensuite, deuxièmement, en second lieu; enfin, dernièrement, en dernier lieu, finalement; d’une part … d’autre part; en somme, pour conclure.
Expressions that add to or extend an idea: en ce qui concerne; non seulement … mais; de plus; en outre; par ailleurs; de même; ensuite; d’autre part; aussi (à l’intérieur d’une phrase); également.
Expressions that concede some ground in an argument: pourtant; toutefois; cependant; néanmoins; mais.
Expressions that introduce an explanation: en effet; car; c’est à dire.
Expression that introduce an example: ainsi; pour ce que est de; par exemple; quant à.
Expressions that place ideas in opposition: en revanche; au contraire; par contre.
Expressions that indicate a consequence: c’est pourquoi; en conséquences; d’òu; par conséquent; ainsi; alors; donc; aussi (au début d’une phrase).
Expressions that indicate a refutation: certes … mais; bien sûr … mais.

I’m tempted to create an analogous grouping of expressions in English without aiming for a one-to-one translation within each group

As a quick understanding check, we did a James Bond-themed fill-in-the-blank exercise from École Suisse. Then we dove a bit more deeply into ways to express opposition using expressions function as different parts of speech:

conjunctions: alors que; tandis que; si (+ indicatif).
adverbs: au contraire; à l’opposé; inversement; en revanche; par contre.
prepositions: contrairement à; à l’inverse de; à la place de; au lieu de.
other: quant à + nom/pronom; pour ma (ta / sa / …) part; de mon (ton / son / …) côté); en ce qui me (te / vous / les / …) concerne.

Whew! Lots of grammar. I will have to find ways to practice using these. Just having lists and categories won’t get me that far, I suspect.

From the rest of the lesson we covered lighter fare. First Léonard introduced four movie posters and asked me to speculate on the nature of each film based just on the poster:

It was a fun exercise. Next he had me watch the trailer of each film and then revise my opinion after each one. Here they are:

Finally, he asked me to write a paragraph or two comparing these four films. Given I had only 10 minutes remaining and only posters and trailers to go on, my writing was pretty junky. I’ll post it here to keep myself honest, but it’s full of mistakes:

Cet après-midi mon enseignant de français m’a proposé quatre films: Énorme, Le Chant du loup, Les Misérables, et J’ai perdu mon corps. C’est une collection tellement variée. Les deux derniers abordent des thèmes sérieux. En revanche, Énorme et Chant du loup sont ciblés vers des gens qui veulent seulement s’amuser sans refléchir. Énorme imagine une situation assez commune en couple: tandis que l’homme veut être papa, la femme s’oppose à l’idée. Il trafique sa pilule, ainsi une grossesse arrive.

Autant Énorme est drole, autant Chant du loup est intense….

That about wraps up Day 10. I have to confess, I’m starting to get worn out with these intensive lessons. But I’m sure I’m still learning, and I am enjoying myself, so onwards to Day 11!

2021-08-092021-08-13

Summer Lessons Day 9: La Peine de Mort, Hiro

Happy Monday! On this first day of of the third week of my French Staycation I worked with a new teacher, Sofia, as part of my package of lessons from ILA in Montpellier. We covered an awful lot of ground in four hours, and I’m looking forward to working with Sofia again twice more this week.

After basic introductions we took as our jumping off point the mechanics of making verbal tenses agree between clauses. This sounds like a fairly dry grammatical point, but Sofia did a great job of weaving it into many different activities:

Converting direct discourse to indirect discourse: Converting “‘If don’t all get vaccinated, the pandemic will last longer’, said French President Macron.” to “French President Macron said that if we didn’t all get vaccinated the pandemic would last longer.” We reviewed the rules and did some online exercises.
We watched a video of woman-on-the-street interviews about what eating will be like in the future, then it was up to me to relate what each person said using this indirect discourse technique. One of people interviewed brought up science-fiction writer René Barjavel, whom I had not heard of. He wrote La nuit de temps, which apparently involves people eating only gel capsules. I’ll have to add it (and also his L’Enchanteur) to my reading list.

Next we turned to vocabulary and mechanics for expressing ones opinion about something. We started with a heavy subject (capital punishment) and then moved on to the efficacy of a French ad campaign and finally a news story about an unusual gathering in Spain.

First we read together a famous speech against the death penalty by Victor Hugo in the National Assembly in 1848. The official transcript records at times reactions and heckling, and from which side of the aisle it arose: “«Nous l’abolirons!» (Agitation.)” or “«…renversez l’echafaud.» (Vif assentiment sur plusieurs bancs.)” Pretty funny. Sofia noted a neat rhetorical trick that Hugo uses, invoking “the will of the people”, when (then as now) it was in fact the elite who reliably opposed capital punishment while the majority of the public often supported it.
After that, we watched a modern, teen-produced video about the eventual end of the death penalty in France in 1981. Sofia introduced it by noting that the speaker was an amateur who mashed his words a bit, and that this was a deliberate challenge for oral comprehension. I actually had little difficulty understanding him aside from not catching the name of Mitterand’s first Justice Minister (Robert Badinter). It helps that I had studied much of this history in French lessons over the last five years (don’t remember which ones). One of the earliest George Brassens songs (Le Gorille) is about the brutality of the death penalty, though it’s not apparent until the final verse:

La suite serait délectable
Malheureusement, je ne peux
Pas la dire, et c'est regrettable
Ça nous aurait fait rire un peu
Car le juge, au moment suprême
Criait "maman!", pleurait beaucoup
Comme l'homme auquel, le jour même
Il avait fait trancher le cou
Gare au gorille!

Next, Sofia asked me to write on the spot 250 words about the death penalty in the US, and about my opinion. She gave me 25 minutes to do it. I didn’t do a great job of managing my time, and spent way too much of it researching the facts of the subject instead of writing the response. Here’s the very rushed 293 words I produced. It turns out it’s a lot harder to write at speed, and without frequent recourse to resources like Linguée or Larousse. Here’s my first draft produced under time pressure, and the version with Sofia’s corrections applied.

Version originale

Aux États-Unis, la peine de mort reste légale au niveau féderale et aussi en 27 sur 50 des États individuelles (mais en trois parmi eux le gouvernor a imposé une pause légale d’une durée indefini). Il y a chaque année une trentaine d’executions judiciare, dont les plupart sont ordonnées par un gouvernement d’un État. De 1970 à 2020, il n’y avait aucune execution au niveaux fédérale, mais ça a changé pendant la campagne de reélection de Donald Trump en 2020. Il a ordonnés 13 executions dans les dernières douze mois de son mandat. Le dernier incuplé exécuté par l’État a été le 16 janvier 2021.

Dans les années 1990, le president actuel, Joseph Biden, a championé les projets (devenues lois) qui punissaient quelques crime avec cette peine, mais pendant la campaigne de 2020 il a adouci sa position. Malgré un absence d’execution après son instauration, il a évité à faire une prononcement claire sur sa position. Dans l’état ou j’habite, le Massachusetts, la dernière execution a été achevé en 1947, mais la peine de mort n’était pas aboli jusqu’à 1984.

Selon moi, la question de l’abolir ou garder la peine de mort est trop exagéré dans notre societé. Quant à moi, je suis contre la peine de mort, mais s’il reste disponible dans les cas les plus grave, ça peut exister sans trop de mal pour nos société. Il y a beaucoup plus d’injustice dans le comportement quotidienne de la Police, dans les abuses dans le système pénale, et dans les inégalité econimique. Pris ensemble tous ces injustice cause beaucoup plus de mort que les execution gouvernementale. Je préférais que les opposant de la peine de mort concentraient sur le sort de ce qui reste vivant que de lutter pour les plus culpable.

Version corrigée

Aux États-Unis, la peine de mort reste légale au niveau féderal et aussi en 27 sur 50 des États (mais en trois parmi eux le gouverneur a imposé une pause légale d’une durée indéfinie). Il y a chaque année une trentaine d’exécutions judiciaires, dont la plupart sont ordonnées par un gouvernement d’un État. De 1970 à 2020, il n’y a eu aucune exécution au niveau fédéral, mais ça a changé pendant la campagne de réélection de Donald Trump en 2020. Il a ordonné 13 exécutions dans les douze dernièrs mois de son mandat. Le dernier inculpé a été exécuté par l’État le 16 janvier 2021.

Dans les années 1990, le président actuel, Joseph Biden, a soutenu les projets (devenus lois) qui punissaient certains crimes avec cette peine, mais pendant la campagne de 2020 il a adouci sa position. Malgré un absence d’exécution après son instauration, il a évité de se prononcer clairement sur sa position. Dans l’état ou j’habite, le Massachusetts, la dernière execution a eu lieu en 1947, mais la peine de mort n’a été aboli qu’en 1984.

Selon moi, la question d’abolir ou de garder la peine de mort est trop exagérée dans notre societé. Quant à moi, je suis contre la peine de mort, mais si elle reste possible dans les cas les plus graves, ça peut exister sans trop de mal pour nos société. Il y a beaucoup plus d’injustice dans le comportement quotidien de la Police, dans les abus dans le système pénal, et dans les inégalités économiques. Prises ensemble, toutes ces injustices causent beaucoup plus de morts que les exécutions gouvernementales. Je préférerais que les opposants de la peine de mort se concentrent sur le sort de ceux qui restent vivant plutôt que de lutter pour les plus coulpables.

Time for something lighter! Three closing pieces.

We watched and discussed a video about the creation of an advertising campaign for Decathlon sports: «Le sport rend le monde meilleur». Again, the theme was oral comprehension followed by expressing my opinion on a subject.
We read an article from the International Courier about a recent gathering of Rainbow Family (translated into French from the original in El Mundo), happening this year in La Rioja, a region of northern Spain. Think Burning Man, but with multiple chapters, more sex, less drugs, and topping out at 30,000 people. The one in La Rioja has only 100 or so. I’ll leave to my readers’ imagination my opinion on this subject.
Last item of the day, we watched a music video of a song entitled “Hiro” by singer Soprano. In it a 30 year old French man enumerates all the things he would do if he could travel back in time like Hiro Nakamura. This was a nice way of going full circle with the original grammar exercise – the whole song is phrased with hypothetical subordinate clauses: «Si j’avais eu le pouvoir de Hiro Nakamura, … J’aurais été voir mon grand-père une dernière fois, … J’aurais été accueillir Mahomet à Médine … J’aurais créé un gigantesque bouchon sous le pont de l’Alma.»

Whew! What a packed morning of lessons. Tomorrow I get to start anew with other teacher of the week, Léonard. I’m sure I’ll learn lots more.

2021-08-06

Summer Lessons Days 6-8: Toilets, cows, theater and vacations

My second week of online vacation lessons chez moi has come to an unexpectedly early end. I met with my teacher Dominique, furnished by the Institut Linguistique d’Adanet of Montpellier, France, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. Thursday was a scheduled day off, but early this morning I learned that Dominique had to cancel our Friday session for unnamed reasons. I’m hoping to do one more week of classes with ILA and a different teacher, but we’ll see if that materializes – Covid is once again disrupting all sorts of activities in France.

Dominique is a devotee of French film and was the source of the recommendations for Molière and Le Prénom which I wrote about earlier. He suggested a few others (Cuisine et dépendence, Les Choristes, Knock) that I plan to watch in the coming weeks. Our classes were a familiar mix of reading short texts or listening to short audio, and then discussing them. There was a smaller amount of written production, and the grammar work was limited to one set of exercises on prepositions.

Here are some of the item we’ve looked at together.

Les toilettes les plus insolites!, a video report of four oddball bathrooms to be found in various Belgian restaurants:

Copier Cloner, a short animation about the folly of modern techniques for raising beef cattle:

Le théâtre à nu, a recent newspaper column reviewing three books about French theater (got that?): Sauver le moment , a memoir by actor Nicolas Bouchaud; Patrice Chéreau l’intranquille, a biography and analysis of this important director; and S’adresser à tous, a challenging critique of the historical breadth of French theater and its recent cooptation by the forces of capitalism or neoliberalism.

Vacances pour tous, une utopie qui s’éloigne, a recent newspaper column about the evolution of the French notion of vacation as an institution in and of itself, starting with the emergence from World War II, and detailing the involvement of workers committees, dedicated paycheck deductions, and the construction of government subsidized vacation housing. From the early 80’s or so it’s been downhill in the eyes of this columnist, as first independent mutual tourism societies and then for-profit businesses have moved into the industry, pushing out their more egalitarian predecessors and catering exclusively to the well-heeled. In the thick of the fourth wave of Covid in France, the author laments the possible death of French vacations for all.

My homework for Friday morning was to write a brief summary of this article, but as our course was cancelled I have only my original version, without corrections from a teacher. I guess that will have to suffice …

Version originale

«Les vacances», un pilier de la culture française, comprend plusieurs éléments qui évoluent ensemble depuis 75 ans: la puissance des travailleurs par rapport à leurs employeurs, les lois qui s’appliquent au travail, l’infrastructure de transport et d’hébergement abordable, et la tradition nationale de quitter la maison annuellement. À partir de 1945, la société française s’organisait pour fournir à tous des jours de congé payés et des opportunités subventionnées de passer ses loisirs à l’extérieur. Au début, c’était les comités d’entreprise et les syndicats qui s’en occupaient, puis les associations touristiques, et finalement les sociétés commerciales. Mais au cours de cette évolution, le rêve solidaire d’un bénéfice pour tous a été perdu. Ceux qui ont de l’argent peuvent profiter des vacances, mais le créneau moins riche risque d’être abandonné. Plus récemment, la crise du Covid-19 a empiré la dérive.

2021-08-06

Le Prénom (2012): un psychodrame

Monday night I watched the 2012 film Le Prénom, directed by Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte. The title (literally “The First Name”, but translated as “What’s in a Name?” for its English language release) refers to the announcement by one of the lead characters that he and his wife plan to name their still in utero son … something awful. The rest of the family erupts in horror and disbelief at the choice, later revealed to be an elaborate practical joke. But the ill-conceived prank sets the tone for a fraught evening and lights the fuse for various true revelations, each one more explosive than the last, among this group of five adults with long, rocky, and intertwined histories.

The film is an adaptation of a successful play by the same name which debuted in 2010, and it’s not clear to me that anything has been gained by the transition from stage to screen. Not a bad play, but a cinematic psychodrame that doesn’t use any of the rich set of techniques that film enables (flashbacks, blurred images, crowded scenes, multiple camera angles, exotic settings, animation, …) feels underdeveloped, even bare. Add to that over-the-top performances by the actors, and I would not particularly recommend this film on its own merits. But certainly a decent exercise in understanding fast-spoken French in a familiar register.

The film is widely available on American streaming services with French audio and English subtitles (I had to mask the bottom of my television screen, as I couldn’t deactivate the subtitles).

2021-08-032021-08-03

La Maison du loup: Jack London et Benoit Solès

This being on vacation thing is pretty sweet. After four-plus hours of French lessons this morning and a leisurely lunch of bread, cheese, basil, peppers, cucumbers, and cherries, I decided to put off doing my assigned homework (watching a French film) and instead curled up on my living-room couch with La Maison du loup, the latest play by Benoit Solès. I had started it some time last week, but never got past the first scene despite carrying it around with me for days. Somehow, today I was in the right frame of mind to continue, and practically inhaled the rest of it in one go. A very pleasant literary digestif.

I first encountered Benoit Solès – quite literally – on December 27, 2019, when I saw him perform his multi-Molière-winning play La Machine de Turing at théâtre Michel in Paris. He both authored the play and originated the title role, first at the festival Off d’Avignon in 2018 and then again later that year in Paris. The show was outstanding and, afterwards, he came out and chatted with the audience, signed posters, etc. I purchased both the script of the play and a poster, which he signed after graciously talking with me for several minutes.

I took great care with the poster during the rest of the trip and had it framed when I got home. It hangs prominently on my living room wall. As for the script, I re-read it a few months later and felt that it lost something in moving from stage to page. Even with Solès’s performance freshly in my mind, the lines were uninspiring and the characterization of Alan Turing seemed forced. I found this quite surprising, as I had enjoyed the play enormously when I say him act it in person, and had found that presentation of Turing thoroughly convincing. Funny (and yet of course blindingly self-evident) how much a professional actor brings to the experience of a piece of theater.

So it was with mixed preconceptions that I received the script of La Maison du loup in a recent issue of L’avant-scène théâtre. Would I find reading it weak tea, and regret once more having scrubbed my plans to attend the 2021 Avignon festival, where this latest Solès creation debuted? Or would I be better able to elicit from the text the magic I had experienced in Solès’s presence in 2019?. Happily, it was more the latter than the former. While I wouldn’t go so far as to label this a “consummation devoutly to be wished”, I did find it quite easy to overlay my extrapolation of a Solès performance on the words before my eyes. The overall result was very satisfying.

The theme of La machine de Turing is the tragedy of a great man who accomplished great things, but whom society could not accept because of his other behaviors, both genuinely odd and harmlessly homosexual. The theme of La Maison du loup is certainly not identical, but in many ways it rhymes. Reformed prisoner Ed Morrell (played by Solès) arrives one summer evening in 1913 at the woodlands house of the celebrated author Jack London. London’s wife Charmian has invited Ed for a visit after reading his magazine article about the plight of a fellow prisoner, Jacob, condemned to death. While Ed thinks he is there to enlist the aid of the famous man in pleading with the California governor for clemency for Jacob, Charmian reveals that she brought him there in order to purchase the story of the condemned prisoner as the basis of Jack’s next novel (Jack, drunk, dissipated, and focused on paying for his lavish forest retreat, initially thinks Ed is an accountant come to collect debts owed to the architect).

As this first round of complications gets untangled, we learn that London’s last several novels have in fact been based on other people’s ideas, rewarmed, partially written by Charmian, and sold under Jack London’s marketable name. But hiding behind Charmian’s tawdry ploy to line up her husband’s next pot-boiler is a more noble motive, to which she eventually confesses: she wants her husband back. Not the bombastic, money hungry, whiskey drinking, morphine popping, image conscious sell-out that he is now, but the gutter-born, idealistic, fiercely righteous, hard-scrabble, auto-bootstrap-pulled socialist that she fell in love with. Charmian’s mid-play declaration of this desire drives both men from her and also apart from each other.

The remainder of the play is a sufficient resolution of this dilemma and as happy an ending as one could expect. London agrees to plead for Jacob, but his attempted intercession comes hours after Jacob’s death. Ed is convinced to divulge the story of his own fifteen-year stay in prison, his discovery of London’s works in the prison library, and the source of his compulsion to rescue Jacob. And London completes his own personal redemption, first refusing to be spoon-fed either a narrative for his next novel or a tonic for his bourgeois betrayal, and then alchemizing the joint story of Ed and Jacob into a powerful polemic against the California penal system.

A somewhat clumsy epilogue to the play, delivered by Ed in a closing monologue, informs the audience that Charmian and Jack’s love is rekindled, their mansion in the woods burns down, and the publication of his last great novel (The Star Rover, 1915) leads to substantial reforms of California prisons, ending various inhumane practices. It goes on to relate that Jack London died soon after from a morphine overdose, while Charmian went on to publish several works on prisoner rights.

How much of this is true, I don’t know. A cursory skimming of the web seems to corroborate that Ed Morrell was a real person, that he was tortured at the hands of the San Quentin prison staff, and that his story was the basis of The Star Rover. But I couldn’t immediately find confirmation of reforms enacted pursuant to the appearance of the novel. Perhaps this indicates Solès has injected his own romance into the story of Ed Morrell and Jack London, or perhaps the fact that this history is all but forgotten is exactly what motivated him to rediscover it and re-educate the theatrical public. Though I must say I’m a bit hazy on exactly what segment of the French theater-going public is in great need of a reminder of the battle for human rights in the American prison system.

Ah, well. Not all art needs to stand up to such demanding scrutiny. The play is, in any case, definitely worth a read. And if you happen to be in France when Solès next performs it (tickets available for January 2022 and May 2022, but with Covid who knows), definitely worth the effort to go see it.

Vocabulary

I made a note of several of the words that I looked up while reading the play. Click through on the links to learn the definitions.

2021-08-02

Auprès de Brassens

My morning news feed included a pointer to a radio documentary from France Culture about George Brassens and his musical origins. I was having trouble dragging myself out of bed for my morning walk, but the prospect of listening to his songs instead of my usual fare of France Inter 6/9 succeeded in pushing me over the edge. The documentary, Auprès de Brassens, runs four hours in total, but so far I’ve listed to the first 45 minutes only.

I like it a lot. Probably more interesting as the 21st hour listening to and about Brassens than it would be as the 1st hour, but if you already know this giant of 20th century french music, it’s worth a listen.

Here’s the blurb from https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-series-musicales/aupres-de-brassens:

«Derrière la pipe et la moustache d’une icône de la chanson se cache un homme paradoxal qui dit bien des choses de la France d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. À l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Georges Brassens, cette série musicale vient célébrer le génie, la poésie et la pensée libre en chanson.»

«Par Victor Macé de Lépinay, producteur du Rayon BD sur France Culture, il est aussi un passionné de chansons et de Brassens en particulier, avec lequel il chemine depuis une vingtaine d’années.»

I definitely plan to listen to the whole series this week.

2021-07-272021-07-31

Summer Lessons, Day 2

I just wrapped up my second day of vacation French lessons while «restant chez-moi» as the catch phrase of 2020 says. The morning session included a conversation about the multi-level, federated control of US education policy (I kid you not), a text about Le Grand Palais and L’Art nouveau, and a grammar review of various temporal markers and of the passé simple. During the afternoon break, I researched the life of French writer André Malraux and then wrote a short narrative biography using the passé simple. We spent an hour correcting it before concluding for the day.

As in my previous post, here is my writing sample before and after our editing session. I ran out of time to do a self-editing pass before we reconvened, so some of the corrections on the right are ones I spotted while presenting the text to my teacher, while others required her input. Even after just two days, I feel more confident in my writing. I am more easily finding simple ways to express my exact meaning, and am more able to self-correct. Progress (though hardly perfection)!

André Malraux (1901 – 1976)

André Malraux, écrivain et homme politique de XX^e siècle, naquit le 3 novembre 1901. Quand il eut quatre ans, ses parents se séparèrent. Il rencontra Clara Goldschmidt en 1921, et les deux se furent marié en octobre de la même année. Quelques semaines plus tard, le jeune couple partirent à Saigon pour un séjour de cinq ans. Jusqu’à 1926, il fit des expedition archéologique (ou des fois des aventures pirateuses), en suivant une deuxième carrière cachée. Il fut rédacteur en chef de L’Impartial, un journal clandestin anticolonialiste. Ce journal publia son dernier numéro le 1^er janvier 1926, après lequel Malraux retourna en France.

Il commença à écrire des livres. Son roman débutant, Les Conquérants, apparut en 1928. C’était une histoire autobiographique qui raconte les voyages d’un european en Chine et à Saigon. Mais son oeuvre la plus connue c’est La Condition Humaine, qui gagna la prix Goncourt en 1933. Il s’agit de la battaille pour la ville de Shanghai en 1927 entre les communistes, les nationalistes, et l’armée gouvernementale gerée par Tchang Kaï-Chek.

Cet esprit revolutionaire l’amena en Espagne en 1936, ou il organisa une force aerienne internationale des volontariats. Il participa à 65 missions, puis retourna en France et, en 1937, écrivit L’Espoir. C’est un roman d’aventures qui raconte des évenements héroïques d’aviation, mais aussi un roman polémique plein des idées antifascistes. Dans les années suivantes, il voyagea aux Etats-Unis et au Canada pour ralliers leur supports pour les républicaines espagnol. Il tourna aussi le film Espoir, sierra de Teruel un adapation cinématique de son roman L’Espoir.

La France entra dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale le 3 septembre 1939, et Malraux fut accepté dans l’armée en avril 1940. Il fut blessé le 15 juin et fut fait prisonnier la prochaine jour, mais avec l’aide de son demi-frère, il s’évada fin septèmbre. Il eut attendu que la Résistance possède des armes et de l’argent, et ne joignit que fin 1943.

…

André Malraux (1901 – 1976)

André Malraux, écrivain et homme politique du XX^e siècle, naquit le 3 novembre 1901. Quand il eut quatre ans, ses parents se séparèrent. Il rencontra Clara Goldschmidt en 1921, et les deux se marièrent en octobre de la même année. Quelques semaines plus tard, le jeune couple partit à Saigon pour un séjour de cinq ans. Jusqu’en 1926, Malraux fit des expéditions archéologiques (ou des fois des aventures flibustières), mais en même temps il poursuivit une deuxième carrière cachée. Il fut rédacteur en chef de L’Impartial, un journal clandestin anticolonialiste. Ce journal publia son dernier numéro le 1^er janvier 1926, après quoi Malraux retourna en France.

Il commença à écrire des livres. Son première roman, Les Conquérants, parut en 1928. C’est une histoire autobiographique qui raconte les voyages d’un Européen en Chine et à Saigon. Mais son œuvre la plus connue c’est La Condition Humaine, qui gagna le prix Goncourt en 1933. Il s’agit de la bataille pour la ville de Shanghai en 1927 entre les communistes, les nationalistes, et l’armée gouvernementale dirigée par Tchang Kaï-Chek.

Cet esprit révolutionnaire amena Malraux en Espagne en 1936, où il organisa une force aérienne internationale de volontaires. Il participa à 65 missions, puis rentra en France et, en 1937, écrivit son nouveau livre L’Espoir. C’est un roman d’aventures qui raconte des événements héroïques d’aviation, mais aussi un roman polémique rempli d’idées antifascistes. Dans les années suivantes, il voyagea aux Etats-Unis et au Canada pour rallier leur support aux républicains espagnols. Il tourna aussi le film Espoir, sierra de Teruel une adaptation cinématographique de son roman L’Espoir.

La France entra dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale le 3 septembre 1939, et Malraux fut accepté dans l’armée en avril 1940. Il fut blessé le 15 juin et fut fait prisonnier le jour suivant, mais avec l’aide de son demi-frère, il s’évada fin septembre. Il attendit que la Résistance possède des armes et de l’argent, et ne la rejoignit que fin 1943.

I gotta say, I really like the word flibustière, which is the adjective form of the noun un flibustier. And of course, my friend Steve Hannaford over at French Vocabulary Illustrated featured flibustier back in 2014, years before I knew I needed it.

2021-07-26

Like, seriously, you know?

The French newspaper Le Figaro has a pedantic article this morning on linguistic tics that infest the French language and that you are well advised to avoid. Similar locutions exist in English, and some in Le Figaro’s list have direct counterparts in English.

«Du coup»: This is properly used to mean “instantly” or “as an immediate consequence”. «Son moteur a explosé et du coup sa voiture a pris feu.» But in familiar French it is being used to mean many things including “hey” («Du coup, tu fais quoi ce soir?», «Mais du coup, tu as réagi comment?»); “instead”: («On ne sort pas ce soir. On fait quoi du coup?»); and “so” («il ne veut pas manger de salade, du coup je fais des haricots»).
«Grave»: The literal translation is “serious”, meaning reserved or dignified. But in current slang it corresponds exactly to the English slang “seriously”: «C’est beau non?» – «Grave!». = “It’s nice, right?” – “Seriously!”. You can almost hear the unspoken “… dude!” as a second word in the response.
«Trop»: This simple “too much” can relieve the lazy speaker of specifying of what, exactly, there is too much. «Que pense-tu de cette robe» «Oh, elle est trop». Le Figaro recommends richer words like «d’époustouflant» or «étonnant», or at least more varied qualifiers like «beaucoup» or «très».
«Genre»: Literally this is “type” or “variety”, as in a literary genre: mystery, romance, horror, adventure. But it is used today in many places where the English slang “like” would fit: «Tu vois ce que je veux dire? Genre c’est dingue non?» = “You see what I mean? Like, it’s crazy, right?” The French Academy weighs in to declare that when starting a sentence, this slang means «pas possible!» or «sans blague!» . I heard this once or twice just yesterday in an episode of Dix Pour Cent.
«Donc»: So you know how it’s awkward to start a sentence all of a sudden? So you sort of take a running start? So that’s what «donc» has become in popular French. I’m afraid I do this all the time in my casual email writing in English. I pepper my sentences with leading “so”. The formal accepted usage of «donc» in French is either as “therefore”, to indicate a conclusion drawn from previous propositions; or, as a return from a digression (“I was in a bar. It was smoky. The piano was playing. The bartender looked mean. Two clients were having a fight. So there I was, trying to find information”). But in popular spoken French, it now plays the part of a gentle attention getting “hear ye! hear ye!” at the start of a conversation turn. As Figaro puts it: À peine ouvrons-nous la bouche que le voilà dégainé: «Donc je voulais te dire», «donc à propos de ce projet», «donc tu en es où en ce moment?»

So there you have it. Seriously, these French are too much. We could, like, totally learn to talk like that in a second. Hey, d’you think? I swear.

2021-07-07

Diary 2021-07-07

I went on vacation last week, so this is an update on various French activities here and there.

This morning I listened to a couple of episodes of the Français Authentique podcast: Faire chou blanc and Je ne progresse plus en français. Que faire? (can’t find a link). They are slow and simple, but not too simple. Decent mindless content while walking, good for reinforcement.

Yesterday I took the placement exam for my 2-week course in August with ILA (Institut Linguistique Adenet) in Montpellier. The school is in Montpellier, but I will be in my living room doing the course by video conference. Traveling to France in summer 2021 was too daunting for post-pandemic me. The test had 100 questions, multiple choice, with an “I don’t know” option for each one. The instructions exhorted me not to guess, for my own benefit, as it’s a diagnostic instrument. Most of the questions were about grammar, 10 or 15 were about oral comprehension, and a handful were about vocabulary. I’d say 60 or 70 felt automatic, another 10-20 required deliberate application of a rule I knew, and the rest were either unknown to me or involved a forgotten entry in a rarely used part of the conjugation table of an irregular verb.

Speaking of Montpellier, one of the other guests at the inn where we was staying was a French woman who had lived all her life in Montpellier before coming to the US some 10 years ago. Had a nice conversation with her. She runs a library-based French conversation group in Pittsburgh.

On vacation I finished the next 1931 Maigret novel, Le chien jaune. It started fairly vaguely, with scattered episodes only loosely connected, and making barely an impression on Maigret. Eventually it all came together to a satisfactory, if not gripping, resolution.

I read a short play, Un pas après l’autre, which appeared in L’avant scène théâtre , numéro 1493, December 2020. Somehow it was only published in July, though it reached me in June? Whatever. Two middle aged sisters with funny rapport, a failing haute-couture shop, a son recovering from PTSD after time in prison for a homicide he was convicted of while a juvenile, which he insists he didn’t commit, a fashion designer intern, a contest for newcomers to the field. Good dialogue, nice character development, then the play ends suddenly with not much story or dénouement. Pity, I liked the set up.

Finally, I had my regular weekly French lesson yesterday with Nora. A lot of it was my relating the story of witnessing a car accident during our vacation, and of various parties’ assisting the driver. Vocabulary words or expressions that came up:

pluvieuse, pluvieux, le brouillard, s’allonger, un ruisseau, renverser, un fuyard, le dénivelé, accroché, fixé, un virage, faire un tonneau, ça nous a pris, elle s’est précipitée, elle s’est ruée, elle s’est hâtée, à portée de voix, à portée de vue, je suis retourné à ma voiture, j’ai repris ma voiture, le caissier/la caissière, les secours, il a eu l’air de, une trousse de premiers secours, il enchaînait, il tremblait, saigner, une hémorragie, un rapport, informer, civière, civet, il réussissait à marcher, un coussin gonflable, bousillé, nous n’étions pas pressés, nous n’avions pas de presse, on s’est mis d’accord, du travail dans le vide, découler.

I think that’s it. All done with vacation, back to ordinary life. Probably less French activity.