The French Contributions to Garbage Innovations
(Reminder! I'll be in Seattle July 20-30th. Please drop me a line if you want to hang out as my schedule is filling up quite fast)
The government run French classes come in all shapes and sizes - fully remote, part time, night classes, and of course the full-time classes I am taking [[1]]. Those full time classes are intensive and designed to "speed-run" you to a level of competence sufficient to take university level courses in French within 12-18 months [[2]].
Anyway, we are about 5 months in, which has been deemed an acceptable amount of time to inflict us on the outer world. Hot off the visit to Ville Marie, we went to a comic festival held annually in Montreal.
Our assignment was simple really - talk to one author and ask them about how they work, their influences, etc. A couple of works in one kiosk caught my eye and I ended up talking to an artist named Jessi.
After chatting with Jessi I bought a few of their smaller works - both because the covers were interesting, in appreciation of taking up their time with some pretty bad French, and to improve my reading comprehension.
Turns out my hopes were dashed on the "improve my reading comprehension" front, as these comics were of a kind that required few, if any, words to enjoy.
Given about half the audience of this blog are not into this kind of thing, I will restrain myself from posting anything from Hi Stranger.
I wouldn't even call this a setback, but either way it proved temporary as I found what I consider an almost perfect book for my purposes: The List of Things That Exist (La liste des choses qui existent [[3]]).
She makes a good point; if we are to have stickers given for good school work, we should also have stickers for punishment (punir). Look at all that beautiful vocabulary. Tag yourself; I'm "Next time, copy your neighbor".
The format is straightforward - there is a big list of objects [[4]] that the two characters talk about for 3-6 pages each. The book is almost ideal for me in many ways: containing (1) common expressions in Quebecois French, (2) humor, (3) novel historic tidbits about the history of everyday items.
For example, garbage.
The word for garbage or trash in French is technically déchets but almost everyone uses poubelle, which - I can now tell you, thanks to this book - is actually named after Eugène Poubelle:
Eugène-René Poubelle (15 April 1831 – 15 July 1907)[1] was a French lawyer and diplomat who introduced waste containers to Paris and made their use compulsory.[2] This introduction was so innovative at the time that Poubelle's surname became synonymous with waste bins (la poubelle) and remains the most common French word for a trash can.
There is also an animated series, but I find I need to pause fairly frequently given the speed of their speech and use of colloquialisms I am still unfamiliar with.
Here are a couple more things I saw in-or-around the Festival BD de Montréal:
False Knees is the work of Joshua Barkman (of Montréal) and is a very good webcomic that's made the rounds quiet frequently. Colleagues from my previous job will probably recognize his work - we had the comic above attached to our seed freezer for many years.
I didn't read any of this but I strongly agree.
The first image poses a good question - sound off in the comments if you know where bébés come from.
And finally, impôt de chien:
[[1]]: Six hours a day, five days a week
[[2]]: About 30% of people who start the full time courses complete the whole program, which frankly is pretty good considering the constraints and conditions - the financial aid isn't sufficient by itself to support a person, not everyone benefits equally from a classroom setting, and not everyone finds it necessary to achieve the high level you come out with
[[3]]: The word existent is just pronounced "exist". Almost every verb in the language does this with the plural third-person form. It's cool. Easy language
[[4]]: A couple of examples: pyjamas, bananas, bread, clocks, glasses
