The weeks pass too quickly. There are only two times during each week when I find any appreciable time to myself. (When I say "appreciable" I might mean "extended" and not "of a good quality," but one might wonder if they're not the same thing.) Aside from Monday and Friday afternoons I'm out of the house for class, meetings, work, and shows. Those four things take up the bulk of my time, and with that I'm fine. (Also eating. I always forget eating. I should do more of it.) If I'm not running around doing those things I'm probably doing homework. My present life doesn't leave much time for existential introspection, but I somehow manage to do that constantly, as well. This is the mindset from which this entry will spring.
French 137: Studies in French Culture
We've started reading and writing and speaking about Michel Tremblay's La Traversée de la ville. It's some good ol' littérature québécois, meaning the language spoken by all the characters is a weird dialect with which I'm not familiar, having been raised, as I was, on good wholesome Parisian French. These Canadians say things like bicyclette and patate instead of vélo and pomme de terre. It's like American slang has been slowly working its way in. Living among them. Gaining power.
Canadian French, specifically that spoken in Tremblay's works, is called joual. Le joual, (which is itself an accented form of the word cheval, meaning horse) is to Parisian French what a strong Southern or Western drawl might be to someone from the North. (I should note at this point that my information on le joual comes from an article by Hélène Ossipov from the American Association of Teachers of French's The French Review, Vol. 67, No. 6, (May, 1994), pp. 944-953. Here's a link for any interested: jstor.org/stable/397645. You may need some sort of association with an academic institution to access it, but I can hook up those serious scholars.)
It's interesting to understand the French-Canadian culture from the writing of this fellow Tremblay who considers le joual as "le symptôme d'une maladie, d'une dépossession," (Tremblay, quoted in Ossipov, 945), "the symptom of a disease, of a dispossession," and that's really what La Traversée de la ville is about -- dispossession, that is.
Imagine if you sent all your kids to live with your parents in Saskatchewan because your husband was lost at sea, but he might still be alive, and then decided years later that it was time to quit your job at the cotton factory in Rhode Island and go find your kids because you realize your life is a bit of a mess, or you realize what's most important in life, or something. That's kind of how the book starts. Or your life. Actually, if this sounds like an exact reflection of your life, I'd like to hear about it, and I'm sure so would M Tremblay.
---
Unfortunately I think that's all I have to say on the subject of subjects at the moment. Next time y'all can hear about cognition or drama. Or both. Probably both.
To those around the Clark University area, I strongly encourage you to come see some of the six wonderful student-written plays happening this month in the Little Center. 7:30pm Wed-Sat. I had the honor and privilege of designing the sound for them all, so I hope your ears will be happy.
Here's a link for that: socialweb.net/Clients/Clark/perfarts.lasso?id=160331
Peace out.
No comments:
Post a Comment