Moliere du Temps

     Travelogue:   A relatively quick check-in this morning.    The highlights of this weekend were a trip to the l’Amere a Boire brewpub (loved the place, liked the beers) and, even better, an evening of dinner and theatre with my host Diane and her husband Denis.    We went to see Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Women) at the Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal’s modern and thriving arts district.   The district reminds me somewhat of the Lincoln Center complex in New York, and is the home of Montreal’s famous jazz festival each summer.   The theatre has a bistro directly off the lobby where we ate—I think it’s so smart to do this because the servers at the restaurant KNOW that most of the clients are trying to make curtain.   It was a lovely, bustling restaurant on a mild evening, and the confit de canard and sticky toffee pudding were excellent.   The theatre itself, though very modern on the exterior, is small and classically constructed, shallow and steep with the rear of the orchestra (le parterre) set under two small levels above (le loge et le balcon).    I didn’t get pictures of the interior (because I didn’t want to look TOO much like a tourist), but here are some near-dusk shots of the exterior and some others of the arts district.

                                                                                                                                     

     And the play.   I did pretty well with the language.  The show is done completely in verse, and was produced in classical French so the Quebecois accent wasn’t much of a problem.   The cadence of the verse helped with my parsing most of the time--I understood 60 or 70% of what was said and could use the context and outstanding acting to help me along.   The show is a comedy about a family with three daughters with a kind-hearted father and domineering mother.  The mother, aunt and one of the daughters desire the life of a savante and are enthralled with the foppish and pretentious M. Trissotin.   The youngest daughter wants the simpler married life (the third daughter was sent away for reasons I didn’t quite understand but returned for the denouement).   Of course, the simple daughter is the daughter that Trissotin desires.   Trissotin is eventually exposed for the fraud that he is when he finds out that the family fortune is not so fortunate.   As a commentary on the pretentions of the scholarly life, it plays quite well even today.   Mise en scene by Denis Marleau, one of Canada’s best known directors, it was staged simply and beautifully, and the acting (especially Trissotin and the aunt, played as a martini-swilling hanger-on) was as strong as you’d expect at one of Canada’s most well-known theatres.  

Psychologue:   The play struck a little close to home to someone firmly in the Ivory Tower who is currently seeking intellectual enlightenment in a manner that is afforded to a precious few of us.  Though I make every effort to not be pedantic (here and elsewhere), I am sure to many non-academics, much of what I and many other “intellectuals” do is pedantry defined.   Wait, was I just pedantic by using the unusual nominal form ‘pedantry’ in that sentence?  Undoubtedly.  In fact, there is a brief appearance by a “true scholar” in Les Femmes Savantes—a simple and humble man who helps to expose Trissotin but is driven away by his rival’s charm and, yes, pedantry.

     I do believe that an important part of most scholarly work is to give it away; that is, to share our scientific and artistic and creative accomplishments with the rest of the world.   The question is how to do this in a way that does justice to the work but also allows individuals not trained in our particular disciplines to gain some real knowledge from it.   A Yahoo headline or USA Today microparagraph certainly doesn’t do the trick but neither do our dissertations, books, and journal articles.   Thinking back to my first entry in this blog about ‘privileged information,” I think what I’m saying here is that scientific and creative products should NOT be privileged—we should do our best to spread the wealth of our work to all whom are interested.   The internet has made the access part of this equation almost a non-issue for billions of humans, but what it hasn’t done, or perhaps has even harmed, is encouraging at least some depth of understanding to the issues of the day.   The temps most certainly are a-changin’.

So if you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to go check Twitter so I can see who’s gonna win this damn election.