I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
J’ai fait…
GPdF Niveau perfectionnement
Chapitre 29: Pronom sujet neutre ou impersonnel
Chapitre 30: Le commentaire. L’identification et la description.
Yesterday I finished reading Les Bonnes, the first play on the reading list for the 20th century French Theater and Performance course that I’m working through. I also watched a filmed version of the unusual 2011 production of Les Bonnes, directed by Jacques Vincey. The play was written in 1947 by Jean Genet and saw its first production that same year at Théâtre de l’Athénée, under the direction of Louis Jouvet. (I’ve encountered Jouvet’s name several times, more as an actor than as a director, though I gather he was quite renowned in both roles. Jouvet was famous enough that the theater has been renamed “Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet” and the plaza it faces renamed “Square de l’Opéra-Louis-Jouvet”). Les Bonnes is a warhorse in the repertoire of French theater. Wikipedia lists 10 notable productions since 1970, and my own web search revealed dozens of others at all levels of professional, amateur, and student theater. It has been translated into English as “The Maids”, which has been regularly performed since 1952. There are film adaptations of both the French and English versions, as well as many video recordings of live theater productions. The play is assigned reading au lycée for many French high school students. In short, a classic.
The play has three characters: Claire, Solange, and Madame. Claire and Solange are sisters, and work as maids for an haute bourgeoise woman known to us only as Madame. The place and time period are unspecified, but it’s French enough for there to be mansards, balls, operas, fancy dresses and furs; modern enough for there to be a telephone in the house; and ancient enough that there are no labor-saving electrical household appliances, leaving the onerous work to the maids. The two sisters hate their life as impoverished, dependent maids, hate Madame, and to some degree also hate each other and themselves. There’s a lot of hate to spread around. One gathers they have been in this situation for years and developed some deep-seated pathologies. Over the course of the play, we learn that Claire and Solange have managed to have Madame’s husband falsely imprisoned based on their own anonymous accusations. The maids are now conspiring to murder Madame herself. Although Jean Genet insists that his play was not inspired by it, there was a well publicized murder by two maids, the sisters Léa and Christine Papin, that transpired in western France in 1933.
The play is structured in three scenes, although no explicit boundaries are provided in the text. In the first scene, Claire and Solange are engaged in a role-playing game for their own benefit, with Solange pretending to be Madame and Claire pretending to be Solange. Claire dresses up in Madame’s clothing, puts on her makeup, and ironically adopts her airs and unconscious arrogance. Exactly why Solange pretends to be Claire rather than herself is never clear, although it contributes to the overall theme of confusing fantasy with reality. The two heap insults and derision on each other and play-act the strangulation of Madame, while also sporadically dropping out of the game to discuss what to portray next or to remark on their unrolling murder plot. A phone call interrupts them: it’s Monsieur, announcing that he’s just been released from prison and requesting that Madame meet him at a restaurant to celebrate. As the expected time of Madame’s return approaches, Claire and Solange end their game, hurriedly restore Madame’s things to their usual places, and otherwise hide traces of their mummery.
The second scene begins as Madame enters (after a failed attempt to visit her husband in prison), still unaware of Monsieur’s release. We now get to see the real interactions between Madame and the maids, which is not far off from the play-acting of scene one although the maids must be more circumspect and subservient in expressing their opprobrium for Madame. Claire prepares poisoned tea, but the two sisters are unsuccessful in maneuvering Madame to drink it. Madame notices many of the things that are awry in her bedroom after the play-acting and starts to suspect that her maids may be misbehaving, possibly even to the point of listening at doors and rifling through sensitive papers. Worried that Madame will realize they must be the source of the anonymous accusations about Monsieur, the sisters distract her with news of Monsieur’s release and the phone message requesting a rendez-vous. Madame is overjoyed and rushes off to meet him, despite the maids’ attempts to delay her long enough to drink the tea.
In the third scene Claire and Solange rip into each other, venomously trading blame for who botched the assassination and who left suspicion-raising evidence of their role-playing. Solange urges them to flee the house, but Claire despondently points out they are trapped by their poverty. The sisters fall back into their fantasy games, but this time with a harder edge. Solange performs a more realistic strangling of Claire-as-Madame, though it is still a mock killing. Solange then bitterly denounces Madame for couching her condescension in terms of kindness and generosity. She apostrophizes at length that she will no longer tolerate going through life bent over, but will stand up straight from now on. Claire resuscitates from her faux-death and insists that they enact the poison drinking scene that failed materialize. Solange is resistant, but finally agrees to serve Claire/Madame the poisoned tea. Claire knowingly drinks the poison and actually dies as Solange imagines herself in handcuffs and the play ends.
I understood most of this material in my first reading of the text, but was confused at a couple of levels. First, it was very unclear from the text which words are intended to be spoken “in real life” from one character to another, which are spoken “in the game”, and which are spoken as an aside to the theatrical audience. Often a single speaker turn contains two or three of these, with no stage directions indicating which words belong in which frame. Some critics assert this is a deliberate editing choice intended to give to a reader the same ambiguity between fantasy and reality that a spectator would have watching the show, and that the characters have in their fictional lives. Second, there are definitely sexual undercurrents in many of the interactions between Claire and Solange, but my French is not strong enough to know where the subtext is glaringly obvious, where the meaning is more implicit, and where I invented hidden meaning when none exists. So, my next stop was to watch a performance of the play.
Kitchen gloves are all he’s wearing …
The performance listed in the course materials is a professionally filmed recording of a 2011 production directed by Jacques Vincey. I watched it (text in hand) and got a very different sense of the play than I had by simply reading it. The print edition I have begins with a five page note from the author: Comment jouer «Les Bonnes» (“How to perform The Maids”). It declares that the atmosphere should be furtive and that the maids should be proper, yet still sexual, but not overtly erotic. The author also acknowledges that the dialogue may not be a realistic representation of how maids talk when they aren’t observed, but asserts that when he goes to the theater he wants to see himself on stage, stripped of conventions and niceties, naked. Director Jacques Vincey decided to start his 2011 production with an abridged version of this note recited by a completely naked man who does not otherwise figure in the rest of the show (though I believe he participates later as clothed stage hand). This introductory scene is presumably why the video merits a YouTube warning “This video contains content that may be offensive to some viewers. Are you sure you want to proceed?”, which also prevents it from being embedded on this page. You’ll have to click the link if you want to see stage directions recited nude.
The Jacques Vincey production is highly stylized with stark sets, dark lighting, minimal costuming, and eerie music. Almost all props are absent, replaced by pantomime. Many lines are spoken slowly with an emotionless, dispassionate affect, while others are delivered in a stentorian shout. I don’t know enough to be confident that labeling this production “avant garde” is formally accurate, but that description will give a non-professional the right impression. I came away from watching it with the thought “Ah, I see, that’s what this play is. An abstract psycho-drama infused with social commentary, class politics, and post-war despair. Got it.”
Only it turns out, this description is heavily influenced by the directorial choices of the production. I was fortunate enough to wonder if this is how it’s always played and looked for other recording of other productions. I found dozens of them on the web, both complete shows and excerpts. They illustrate a wide range of stylistic interpretations of the text, among which Jacques Vincey’s is an outlier. There are productions with more traditional, fully realized sets, props, and costumes. There are productions with less overtly deranged portrayals of Claire and Solange. There are productions where the maids are younger or prettier, ones where Madame is more natural or more horrible, ones that emphasize or ignore the sexual tension in Claire and Solange’s play-acting. There are productions set in prison. By far the oddest one I found was a production by Centaur Theater where the actors are on horses most of the time.
Centaur Theater presents «Les Bonnes»
Must watch: equestrian acting at its finest
All in all Les Bonnes (and Jacques Vincey’s production) was an unusual and satisfying first dish in the nine course meal that I’ve ordered for myself. And I’ve been reminded that not only must one not judge a book by its cover, but one must also not judge a classic play by just one of its productions.
Next week: L’Amante anglaise, by Marguerite Duras.
Last month somebody introduced me to the existence of a course at Harvard University on French Theater and Performance. The one-line description of the class is “In this course, we will trace the history of French theater from the early twentieth-century to the present: its major trends, figures, and forms as well as its intellectual, historical, and political contexts.” I live just a few miles from the university, so briefly flirted with the idea of arranging to audit the class this semester (lectures in French!). But after a few minutes, I settled on a more modest undertaking: read all nine plays on the reading list. I might have to go more slowly than the one play per week pace that the course follows, but I figure it will be a good way to get a sampling from the past 120 years of French theater.
Albert Camus, Les Justes, Gallimard Folio Plus Classiques
Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, Editions de Minuit
Bernard-Marie Koltès, Combat de nègre et de chiens, Editions de Minuit
Nathalie Sarraute, Le silence, Gallimard Folio
Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde, Solitaires intempestifs
Marie NDiaye, Papa doit manger, Editions de Minuit
Wajdi Mouawad, Tous des oiseaux, Actes Sud Papier
The books were all available via the Harvard Coop bookstore. They very nicely put them all in a list so I could fill my cart with just a few clicks. A week later, I had a nice stack of reading for the Fall.
Perhaps if I get wrapped up in this I’ll contact the professor, Matthew Rodriguez, and ask if I can sit in on just one or two lectures to get the feel of it. In the meantime, Allons-y!
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
J’ai fait…
GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
Les Passés
Mettez les verbes au passé composé, puis imaginez une suite à cette histoire.
GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
Emplois du subjonctif.
Répondez en utilisant le subjonctif selon le modèle.
J’ai lu …
La Nuit des temps, de René Barjavel, pp 238 – 410.
I’ve often heard the advice that it’s a mistake to learn vocabulary words in isolation, either as memorized english translations of French word or as memorized French synonyms of a French word. Better, says the recommendation, to remember a sentence that uses the target word so that you learn it in context. I’ve found this advice hard to implement, as I have difficulty remembering whole sentences, especially for the full range of words I’m trying to learn.
But this technique may be more viable for grammar rules. This morning I was doing an exercice on the words tout, toute, tous, and toutes. One of the examples shown was an excerpt from Césaire de Heisterbach, who chronicled the siege of Béziers (between Narbonne and Montpellier) in 1209. It contains this well known (if often re-attributed) passage:
«Comment distinguer les hérétiques des catholique», se demandait-on lors de la prise de la ville de Béziers où vivaient de nombreux cathares, en 1209.
«Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens», répondit Arnaud Amaury, légat du pape Innocent III.»
“How shall we distinguish the heathens from the catholics?”, they wondered upon capturing the city of Beziers which, in 1209, still housed many Cathars.
“Kill them all, God will know his own,” replied Arnaud Amaury, the representative of Pope Innocent III.
Ah yes, a classic in the annals of tactics. Bloodshed aside, the point of this passage was illustrate that the word tous, when used as a pronoun meaning “everyone, all of them”, comes after an imperative verb, and also after any direct object there may be. Thus «Tuez-les tous» and not «Tous les tuez», «Tuez-tous-les», etc. Moreover, because «tous» is a pronoun here you pronounce the final “s” rather than leaving it silent as you would in «Tous les deux» or «tous les gens» where it is an adjective. That makes this Béziers passage less than ideal as a canonical example. Even if I overcame my qualms about memorizing a passage about killing heathens, there’s no hint to help me remember to pronounce that final “s”.
Fortunately for me, there preamble to the exercise gives a second example that is right up my alley: a Georges Brassens song excerpt!
De Pierre à Paul en passant par Félicien Embrasse-les tous, Embrasse-les tous Dieu reconnaîtra le sien Passe-les tous par tes armes Passe-les tous par tes charmes Jusqu’à ce que l’un deux les bras en croix Tourne de l’oeil dans tes bras
From Peter to Paul, by way of Félicien Kiss them all, kiss them all God will know his own Dazzle them all with your wiles Favor them all with your smiles Til one of them faints in your arms Swept of his feet by your charms
I love the reference that Brassens makes in this song, and I am thankful to the authors of this grammar text for drawing my attention to it. I vaguely knew the “Kill them all and let god sort it out” line, but didn’t know the particular french structure of it, nor did I think of it when I first herd the Brassens song. I thought he was just doing his usual anarchy-and-free-love thing. But it’s a great bit of literary jiu-jitsu to add in his anti-clericalism and turn the Church-inspired slaughter into an endorsement of promiscuity. That said, if you look past the sentimental and nostalgic music, there’s still a bit of misogyny to these American-in-2020 ears
Anyway, from a pedagogical view point I like this example is a better fit for me. It has the advantage that it is a song with music, which makes it easier for me to remember, and also that I can listen to the recording of Brassens singing it and pronouncing the final “s”.
It so happens that I know another Brassens song, even more ribald, which shows the contrasting pronunciation of «tous» when used as an adjective «Tous les gars».
Quand Margot dégrafait son corsage Pour donner la gougoutte à son chat Tous les gars, tous les gars du village Étaient là, lalala la la la Étaient là, lalala la la la
When Margot would unclip her blouse To let her cat nurse from her breasts All the men, all the men of the village Would come hooting and howling Lalala la la la!
If you listen to the whole song, Margot is presented as a simple (but wise?) shepherdess, innocently thinking that the men are there to see a cute kitty-cat that she had adopted when its mother was lost. The men are happy to let her think whatever she like so long as they get their daily peep show. The women of the village are none too happy about it, though, and end up organizing themselves and beating the cat to death. Margot is distraught by this turn of events, takes herself a husband, and from then only shows her charms to him only. Echos of Il était une bergère if you think about it (translation).
And just in case you thought it was only men who sang ribald Brassens songs, here’s a recording of Patachou singing the same song. Recall that Patachou (née Henriette Ragon) is the cabaret nightclub singer who discovered Brassens in 1952, first singing his songs on stage and later getting him up on stage to perform them himself. According to her account, she convinced him to sing because some of his songs were told in the first person by an obviously male character, and presenting audiences with a woman singing them was too much of a stretch.
Finally, I can’t resist including this all-instrumental version of Brave Margot, posted just a few months ago by a classical guitarist
Les charentaises are a particular style of slippers made in La Charente, a department of France some 80 miles north east of Bordeaux. I’ve driven past it, but never gone there. These slippers have been made in La Charente for over 350 years, first by hand and then by machine. They were originally intended for military and rural life, as a comfortable indoor shoe that you could keep on all day long while you donned and doffed your outdoor boots or wooden shoes. A number of charentaises-making factories opened there in the first years of the 20th century, and they started aggressively exporting the slippers globally in the 1950s. At its peak in the 1970s, this French industry was exporting over a million pairs of slippers each year. Together with a beret and a baguette, a pair of charentaises became part of the French caricature.
The global center of shoe manufacturing today is in Asia, as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia account for 75% of all output. While French production of slippers fell precipitously in the past 50 years, it’s having something of a resurgence, both in La Charente and in Brittany. The French government has been pursuing a “Made in France” industrial initiative for the past few years, and generally has a soft spot for saving culturally iconic production. My French teacher assigned me to watch a documentary about the re-opening of one of the original charentaise factories and write a response about the importance (or not) of preserving industries like this.
Here’s my rather rambling response, after applying corrections suggested by my teacher N.M. In other posts I include both my original draft and the final draft after editing in order to display my errors. But as this post is long enough already, I’m posting only the final draft.
Version rédigé avec N.M.
C’est quoi la forme de la vie? La pomme est ronde, un cristal de sel est cubique, la coquille d’un escargot est spirale. Quelle est la morphologie de la vie? Dans son livre La Maison de joie: Une histoire de la vie et de la mort, l’historienne Jill Lepore constate que de l’Antiquité à la Lumière les peuples de l’Ouest ont imaginé que la vie est comme un cercle. On est né, on reçoit la sagesse et les traditions du passé, on habite dans la maison de son père, on laboure les champs de son grand-père, et on mange les recettes de ses arrières grand-mères. Au cours des années, on grandit, on a des enfants, et on leur apprend à faire comme leurs parents. Finalement on vieillit, on sourit aux petits-enfants, on leur enseigne les comptines patrimoniales, et on meurt conforté par le fait que le cercle recommence.
Pourtant depuis la Lumière, cette notion d’une vie cyclique a été remplacée par la vie linéaire. On utilise la raison pour améliorer les techniques. On progresse. On grimpe vers le sommet, on se hisse à l’échelle. L’arrivée de l’industrialisation et des idées de Darwin au XIXe siècle a accéléré cette réorientation de la conception de la vie. On doit construire, accumuler, foncer plus loin ou plus vite. Regardez les milliardaires de nos jours, messieurs Bezos et Branson, qui se hâtent de se lancer dans l’espace. Ruons-nous vers l’avenir!
Mais faites attention! Parce qu’on ne peut pas être au four et au moulin. En se dépêchant sur la longueur du chemin de progrès, il faut qu’on lâche maintes coutumes du passé. On ne peut pas dire «Rien à jeter» en surchargeant les malles de notre culture actuelle. Nos boulevards sont ou pour les chevaux, ou pour les automobiles, mais pas les deux. Un stationnement au centre ville est ou une écurie ou un parking. Et un travailleur doit choisir un métier, soit fermier, soit ouvrier, soit enseignant, soit avocat. Quel choix fera-t-il?
D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?
Ça me rappelle des questions du peintre Paul Gauguin, dont une œuvre est sous-titrée «D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?». Parce que la question de «que garder, de quoi se débarrasser» est à son cœur une question d’identité. Pour les circulaires, répondre à ces trois questions est facile. Nous venons d’un chemin déjà arpenté par nos parents; nous sommes des gens qui entournent cette orbite familiale sans aucun souci; nous repasserons les mêmes chemins à nos tours. Mais chez les linéaires, chez les dévots du progrès, les questions d’identité sont plus difficiles. Il faut changer pour s’améliorer, et un changement de mode de vie exige un changement d’identité. Choisir d’abandonner nos pratiques habituelles, de bouleverser nos affaires, c’est choisir de nous laisser mourir un peu pour permettre de faire naître le prochain «nous». Sommes-nous prêts à mourir?
Enfin, au bout de cette route sinueuse, j’arrive au sujet des charentaises. Cette pantoufle particulière est née il y a trois cent cinquante ans. En 1907, Théophile Rondinaud (parmi les autres) à lancé une usine à Rivière en Charente. Dès les années 1950, son fils James Rondinaud exportait ce produit dans le monde entier. Pendant les années 1970, l’usine Rondinaud employait 1300 travailleurs. La Charente était renommée pour ces jolies pantoufles douces. Mais cinquante ans plus tard, c’est la faillite. Les fabricants asiatiques ont surpassé ceux de la Charente, les chiffres d’affaires ont chuté. Même avec une consolidation de quatre fabricants sous le nom «la Manufacture Charentaise» (LMC), et avec la protection inédite du titre d’Indication géographique «charentaise de Charente-Périgord», cette société a dû mettre la clé sous la porte en 2019.
Est-ce qu’il faut être en deuil pour cette industrie française? Il y a deux ans qu’Emmanuel Macron a annoncé son initiative de relocaliser certaines chaînes de valeur pour les produits critiques. La crise sanitaire du Covid-19 a démontré la sagesse de fabriquer les molécules pharmaceutiques intra-pays. Une usine pour faire les semi-conducteurs en France c’est stratégique pour ne pas être dépendant de la Chine pour nos ordinateurs et nos portables incontournables. Mais les pantoufles? Forcément un manque imprévu de chausseurs duveteux ne serait pas une crise nationale. Les orteils patriotiques de la France survivraient.
Ici ce n’est pas une question de nécessité mais d’identité. Si un membre de la famille Rondinaud, comme l’arrière petit-fils Olivier Rondinaud, veut continuer l’entreprise, qu’il y aille. Mais si la rentabilité est insuffisante, on doit poser la question: d’où viendra la subvention? À mon avis, ceux qui s’identifient aux charentaises doivent subventionner eux-mêmes leur fabrication en France. Si c’est Olivier Rondinaud seul, je souhaite qu’il ait une grande fortune personnelle. Si ce sont les travailleurs de l’usine, peut-être qu’ils voudront travailler à des salaires réduits. Enfin, si les habitants du département ou du pays s’identifient profondément avec les charentaises, une subvention nationale serait dans ce cas-là la plus correcte. Pas de problème pour moi.
Mais il se trouvera, peut-être, que les consommateurs de la France préfèrent acheter les pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préfèrent renouveler les autoroutes, et que Mais peut-être qu’il se trouve que les consommateurs français préfèreraient acheter des pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préféreraient renouveler les autoroutes, et que les électeurs préféreraient revaloriser les salaires des soignants. Évidemment, il y a des limites budgétaires. Donc, qui sont les Français? Un peuple qui donne priorité à ses pieds? Ou un peuple en marche vers l’avenir sur des chemins modernes, avec des soignants correctement payés, mais avec les pieds à la chinoise?
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
L’Invité de 8h20: Le Grand Entretien (FranceInter)
Pierre Rosanvallon : “Il y a un désir d’égalité, que chacun soit reconnu dans sa singularité”
Atiq Rahimi, écrivain et réalisateur, et Jean-Pierre Filiu, historien. Afghanistan : “Maintenant les islamistes, les djihadistes partout dans le monde, se disent que c’est possible”
“10 à 11% des enseignants pas vaccinés” affirme le ministre Jean-Michel Blanquer
Gérard Larcher, président du Sénat, sénateur LR des Yvelines, est l’invité du Grand entretien de France Inter.
Bruno Le Maire : “le pass sanitaire n’a ralenti ni la consommation, ni la croissance”
Le 7/9 par Nicolas Demorand , Léa Salamé (FranceInter)
I’m going to try doing some simple French exercises daily as a supplement to consuming organic language (reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos). Exercises were a big part of how I learned French in high school, but I haven’t done much with them in the past 10 years. Maybe the habit of a little each day will be helpful.
I randomly picked a source of exercises from my shelf: Grammaire progressive du français (niveau avancé). Long ago I had written in the answers to the first few exercises, so I’m starting with Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
GPdF Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif
La Place de l’adjectif
Qualifiez chacun des éléments soulignés. Mettez cet adjectif à la place qui convient.
Ajoutez un adjectif de votre choix.
Faites pour chacune des phrases une paraphrase explicative comme dans l’exemple.
Trouvez des adjectifs et placez-les comme il convient pour terminer cette description.
GPdF Chapitre 3: Les Négations
Les Différentes négations
Donnez le contraire.
Répondez avec la négation qui convient.
Complétez ce texte avec les éléments donnés en utilisant des renforcements de la négation.
Faites des phrases négatives avec les éléments suivants comme dans l’exemple.
GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
Le Présent
Récrivez les phrases en utilisant la forme «être en train de» quand c’est possible.
Complétez le texte en choisissant le verbe qui convient.
Utilisez le présent à la place du futur pour rendre le texte plus vivant.
GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
Formation et caractéristiques
Récrivez selon le modèle.
Faites le portrait de l’homme ou la femme de votre vie en utilisant le subjonctif.
J’ai regardé …
C’est une autre histoire with French closed captions.
Random French bits I picked up in the past week that don’t merit a post in and of themselves.
I watched the first one and a half episodes of the Netflix series Marseille. It’s more or less the French equivalent of House of Cards, but with Gérard Depardieu taking the role of Kevin Spacey. It’s unclear to me how explicitly Netflix meant it to be a direct adaptation of the concept, but others have noticed the obvious parallels as well. One can only hope that Netflix didn’t mean to have their leading actor plagued by sexual assault scandals, but Depardieu seems to have that in common with Spacey as well. So far I’m willing to separate the art from the man and haven’t given up on watching Depardieu films. I’ll see if this TV series is worth watching more of.
In this week’s French conversation lesson I found myself explaining how I met a French-teacher friend, and then I found myself explaining my mathematics graduate school career and why I left, and then I found myself explaining my advisor’s research, and next thing you know I’m explaining the five families of modern cryptography schemes and the corresponding hard math problem each one is based on. I was able to get across most of the ideas (and kudos to my teacher for sticking with me on this), but I lacked some of the technical terms in French for various mathematical objects. It’s times like these I wish I had reviewed Cryptographie sur les courbes elliptiques in advance of my lesson.
https://youtu.be/8WTesYp5H8o
Google News and YouTube keep feeding me various Georges Brassens materials, which are all the rage as we draw near the 100th anniversary of his birth in October 2021. This one is a particular gem. It’s an hour-long TV program from 1972 (Bienvenue à George Brassens) that has Brassens in a cozy setting surrounded by maybe 100 members of a television audience. The show interleaves performances with interviews, and many of Brassens collaborators are present and participate in the discussions. A large part of the charm of this particular video is the anonymous audience members in all their 1970’s glory. Look at the hair styles, what they are wearing, how and what they smoke, and their reactions to his sometimes ribald songs. I have some sense of what Americans in the 1970’s were like, as I lived through 90% of the seventies and watched plenty of movies and films from that time. But French styles in the 1970s were different, so this is a nifty look back through both time and space.
Brassens is also charming and disarming with his total lack of pretentiousness.
Rubens, 1 of N
I watched a couple more videos from Manon Bril’s channel C’est une autre histoire. I’m going through them chronologically just for the heck of it. She’s OK at the beginning but based on a few later ones I’ve seen she gets a good deal better as she goes. The one about Zeus, Sex, and Power was only OK. The one about Le jugement de Pâris was better.
I finally got around to watching the final two episodes of the Netflix series Lupin. They were OK, but the plot holes were large enough to drive une fourgonne through. It’s better if you just enjoy the scenes and the acting and don’t worry too much about how it all fits together. I’ve read one Lupin short story long ago, but ordered from my local bookstore one of the re-issues that the success of the Netflix series has spawned. It’s taking a while to arrive, but I’ll read it someday …
