Learning in Québec
- Sylvia Ann Manning
- I'm someone who began learning French when I was 53. I took a BA in French at 60 but wasn't happy with my level of comprehension (though I read very well). So, having really become comfortable with Spanish only by living on the Mexican border, I'm spending more time in Québec and near the border of Quebec, in Vermont, to see if I can do that here with French. I want to encourage others to do the same.
Showing posts with label Bibliothèque St. Jean Baptiste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bibliothèque St. Jean Baptiste. Show all posts
Monday, 16 July 2012
Vraiment?
Here again at long last, in these pages and in this lovely city. It's been so long, I'd forgotten the password.
But I'd never forget this lovely statue who's been all these months, 20 of them since last I wrote here and nearly that many since last I saw her, sitting and reading outside the old St. Matthew's Anglican Church made into a library, on rue St. Jean Baptiste in le faubourg St. Jean Baptiste.
The summer festival ended yesterday. The next-to-last performance was Bettye Lavette at Place d'Youville, where one can still enjoy the show from beyond the official site if for any reason you could not buy a pass. Bettye Lavette has been singing Motown soul jazz for 50 years. She's 66 now and still sounds great.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Two girls reading outside St. Jean Baptiste.
This was the girl reading on the last day of March. Ceci a été la fille en lisant la dernière jour de mars.
A real girl reading in the graveyard that is attached to the Bibliothèque St. Jean Baptiste today, April 2, 2009. Une vrai jeune femme dans la cimitière attachée a la Bibliothèque St. Jean Baptiste aujourd'hui, 2 avril, 2009.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
A Sunday prose poem
Les classiques du jazz revisités
If you suffer from having fallen out of love with life, people, do something like this : Go to a library made from an old church with Jesus carved in dark wood with windows arched and bejewelled by winter light from the cold day beyond
And listen to jazz (or so they billed it, and you must believe they had reasons) with no voices but of strings, with only as Dylan’s line has it, the strength of strings.
And have it be free, this concert in library on a Sunday when the good townspeople are at churches which haven’t yet become libraries and the good street people who use the library as a study and study itself as a shelter haven’t been let in yet because this music happens early, earlier than that
And sit where you cannot see three women playing viola, violin, piano
And sit where with some old smooth stones, wood, pieces of sand become glass become rubies and emeralds and sapphire you
Let the music be only itself again, just Brubeck, even, par exemple.
Look at the listeners’ faces. Look at anyone or all.
All is forgiven.
They do know how to love.
They love what takes them back to before words came
(about the same time they had to accept their separateness from the flow of life all around them, when they had to begin to learn to live without that music, their second childbirth, really,and for most of us when we were two, when we had to begin to accept that each of us is separate here, to accept the incredibly sad truth)
to signal the singularity of winter beyond sweet soft communal protection.
(There is no English translation worthy of the French word, commune, I learn from my favorite dictionary.)
There is no better way to learn to love again than with what happens now, where you are, inside a shell of music without words, a church without religion.
[15 février, Une Concert Desjardin à la Bibliothèque Saint-Jean-Baptiste, à 11 h]
If you suffer from having fallen out of love with life, people, do something like this : Go to a library made from an old church with Jesus carved in dark wood with windows arched and bejewelled by winter light from the cold day beyond
And listen to jazz (or so they billed it, and you must believe they had reasons) with no voices but of strings, with only as Dylan’s line has it, the strength of strings.
And have it be free, this concert in library on a Sunday when the good townspeople are at churches which haven’t yet become libraries and the good street people who use the library as a study and study itself as a shelter haven’t been let in yet because this music happens early, earlier than that
And sit where you cannot see three women playing viola, violin, piano
And sit where with some old smooth stones, wood, pieces of sand become glass become rubies and emeralds and sapphire you
Let the music be only itself again, just Brubeck, even, par exemple.
Look at the listeners’ faces. Look at anyone or all.
All is forgiven.
They do know how to love.
They love what takes them back to before words came
(about the same time they had to accept their separateness from the flow of life all around them, when they had to begin to learn to live without that music, their second childbirth, really,and for most of us when we were two, when we had to begin to accept that each of us is separate here, to accept the incredibly sad truth)
to signal the singularity of winter beyond sweet soft communal protection.
(There is no English translation worthy of the French word, commune, I learn from my favorite dictionary.)
There is no better way to learn to love again than with what happens now, where you are, inside a shell of music without words, a church without religion.
[15 février, Une Concert Desjardin à la Bibliothèque Saint-Jean-Baptiste, à 11 h]
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