Ten Little Chances to be Free

Québec review is coming. In the meantime, here's the audio, untracked and in WMA due to my computer's ongoing fail:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/nh7ptw

Les Misérables - Québec City - 19 October 2008 (Closing night)
Gino Quilico (Jean Valjean), Alexandre de Grandpré (Javert), Geneviève Charest (Fantine), Sophie Tremblay (Eponine), Carl Poliquin (Marius), Myriam Brousseau (Cosette), Kevin Houle (Enjolras), Jean-Raymond Châles (Thénardier), Kathleen Fortin (Mme Thénardier)

I can give ensemble information on request, but there was nothing in the playbill about the Gavroche/little Cosette schedules.

Act I is significantly louder (and rather more overloaded) than Act II, because the show was massively over-amplified and I unplugged the microphone at intermission.

Cookies to whoever's willing to track it; cookies and Frenchboy slash to whoever's willing to mail me a CD of the tracked version.

Haha. My first French paper, a few weeks earlier in the semester, came back with an A and glowing comments about my writing style. Of course, the assignment for my first French paper involved making up a Belle Époque character and writing a one-to-two-page short story about them, and I learned most of my French from reading novels. Piece of cake. This latest assignment--the one I stayed up all night revising on Monday--was an essay, and I have read exactly zero formal academic works in French. So of course this one came back as one giant scribble of red pen, with comments to the effect that the style is as graceful as a one-legged blind baby elephant. (No, she didn't actually say that, but I had no idea you could fit the word 'maladroit' that many times onto two pages.)

Obviously this means I need to get my ass to Groupe Hugo and read some of the articles there. Dammit, you can't learn if you can't see how it's done.

[one hour later] I've read about half of this and it's utterly fascinating: all about Les Misérables as a work of history, about the changes between the 1848 draft and the final version in 1862. I can't say it's going to improve my formal writing, but god is it shiny.

I swear around here there are two weeks in late April/early May and two weeks in October where everyone gets to say, "Oh look, the weather is so beautiful!" and then the rest of the year it's either in the 90s with 86% humidity or in the 30s with sleet and freezing rain.

...at least in the winter, if you're cold, you can move around and/or put on more clothing. Heat? You're screwed. Not to mention city doesn't fucking smell like sewer gas in the winter. I could be biased, though, because cold just makes me shiver whereas heat makes me break out in hives.

(Yes, yes, I know, quit whining and move to Seattle/London/somewhere else cool and rainy. I'm working on it.)

I am... trying to work on a translation of that article from the Société des Amis du Peuple that I put up last week. It's mostly easy going, but there are one or two spots... "Tel était le texte de toutes les conversations; elles ne trouvaient tant d’approbation, queparce que chacun était pour son interlocuteur la preuve vivante de la vérité des accusations." Problem spot is in italics; the rest I have a firm enough grip on. If anyone with better French than mine wants to have mercy on me, I'd be much obliged. XD (Watch it be either blindingly obvious, or a typo I took at face value. Headdesk.)

Speaking of which, I might actually annotate this one. Usually any footnotes lying around my translations are from the original author; this one has no footnotes in the original, but it also has references to a number of current events that I'd never heard of and had to look up on wiki.fr. So unless y'all are conversant enough with carlism and the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois that you don't need any help, looks like this one will have some explanation.

( Random tl;dr blatherings about language learning and summer plans under the cut )