This infographic reprensent the most borrowed library books (from The Guardian website)

What are you all-time favourite books ? What books do you recommend reading ?

les meilleures ouvertures de romans dans la littérature : en Anglais, bien sûr !

Lucian Freud is a painter of german origin, born in 1922.

He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the famous psychnalyst.

Here are some of his paintings.

Freud’s subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. To quote the artist: “The subject matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.

” I paint people,” Freud has said, “not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”

 (a self-portrait)

more paintings here

taken from : http://www.anglarene.com/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=254

Le temps étant limité, il est important de s’organiser de façon à être le plus efficace possible.

Tout d’abord, il faut essayer d’identifier la nature ou le genre du texte. On peut pour cela commencer par regarder la source, en bas à droite (est-ce un extrait de roman, de journal?), et la présentation générale du texte (y a-t-il du dialogue, etc).

Ensuite, il est intéressant de lire les premières questions posées avant même de lire le texte: on peut y apprendre pas mal de choses importantes qui vont guider votre première lecture, la rendant ainsi efficace. Vous avez peut-être déjà remarqué qu’une première lecture sans but est souvent stérile et inefficace. Les premières questions portant souvent sur les personnages et leurs liens, le lieu, parfois la période et souvent sur un ou plusieurs thèmes, elles donnent des indications précieuses qui vous permettre d’émettre quelques hypothèses sur le contenu du texte.

 Vous aurez alors à coeur de vérifier ces hypothèses, même limitées, lors de votre première lecture qui sera ainsi efficace: on lit toujours mieux lorsqu’on a un but! Inutile de s’arrêter aux mots qui vous posent problème, ne cherchez qu’à vérifier vos hypothèses.

Après cette première lecture, lisez cette fois-ci toutes les questions posées. Vous vous apercevrez que vous pouvez déjà répondre à quelques unes d’entre-elles, au moins partiellement: prenez tout de suite de notes au brouillon. Vous verrez que très souvent, la plupart des questions vous apportent en fait de précieuses indications sur les textes: si une question porte sur la nature des rapports entre un père et son fils, on apprend qu’il y a au moins deux personnages masculins, l’un étant le père et l’autre son fils, et que vous trouverez des indications sur leurs rapports. Non seulement ce sont des points d’appui pour lire le texte, mais en plus cela vous donne aussi une indication sur le genre littéraire: il s’agit probablement d’un roman ou les relations inter-personnelles sont importantes, avec sans doute un aspect psychologique.

Votre travail de deuxième lecture du texte consistera donc à vérifier ces nouvelles hypothèses, et à commencer à répondre aux questions, là encore sur un brouillon organisé: mots-clés d’un côté correspondant à votre réponse, éléments de justification de l’autre, à savoir termes ou phrases extraites du document ou encore numéros de ligne. L’utilisation du surligneur peut permettre de gagner du temps et de repérer certains éléments essentiels (personnages, lieux, marqueurs chronologiques ou logiques, etc.)

On procède ainsi à plusieurs relectures, chacune étant plus précise que la précédente: plus on a élucidé d’éléments du texte, plus on peut en élucider d’autres par la suite.

 Les mots inconnus Pas de panique: il y aura toujours des mots inconnus et il ne faut pas se laisser impressionner. On ne doit aucun cas s’arrêter à un mot inconnu, car on trouvera souvent des éléments après ce mot qui peuvent aider à le comprendre, du moins approximativement ce qui suffira dans beaucoup de cas.

Lorsque le thème essentiel est identifié et lorsque les éléments de base sont compris, on peut souvent déduire le sens des mots inconnus grâce à ce contexte. N’oubliez pas les mots transparents (semblables en français et en anglais, mais attention aux faux-amis!), les mots dérivés (recherchez la racine en retirant les suffixes et préfixes), les mots composés (ils sont parfois attachés, sans trait d’union). On peut alors émettre des hypothèses de sens pour ces mots, hypothèses qu’on vérifiera en s’appuyant sur le contexte, sur le sens du document.

 Un peu de bon sens

 Si vous ne comprenez pas certains mots ou certains passages qui ne sont pas indispensables pour répondre aux questions posées, ne perdez pas votre temps, passez à la suite!

 Attention aux consignes

• Il est obligatoire de respecter l’ordre des questions et d’indiquer précisément leur numérotation. Bien séparer les réponses à chacune d’entre-elles en sautant une ligne: il faut que ce soit clair. Inutile de recopier les consignes, c’est une perte de temps.
• Si on vous demande de justifier avec des éléments du texte, mettez vos citations entre guillements doubles à l’anglaise: “  “, et surtout notez le numéro de ligne entre parenthèses juste après, même si on ne vous le demande pas. Votre citation pourrait bien être juste et ne pas avoir été prévue dans le corrigé. C’est votre intérêt de permettre à votre correcteur de vérifier rapidement (les délais de correction sont en effet très court ces dernières années).
• Lorsqu’on ne vous demande pas de justifier votre réponse mais qu’on pose simplement une question, répondez-y simplement dans un anglais le plus correct possible. Soyez concis, allez à l’essentiel. Inutile de diluer, bien au contraire: vous perdez du temps et vous en faites perdre au correcteur. Les consignes de longueur ne sont pas à respecter au mot près, on tolère une marge de +-10%. S’il n’y a pas de consigne de longueur, dite ce que vous avez à dire le plus simplement et le plus clairement possible.
• Ne mettez jamais un mot français si vous ignorez celui dont vous avez besoin en anglais. Dites les choses autrement.
• Soignez la présentation et l’écriture. Un devoir agréable à lire et plus facile à corriger sera lu plus attentivement qu’un devoir illisible ou presque, c’est une évidence. C’est votre intérêt!

Like all of us who read “The Catcher in the Rye”, I was saddened by the death of J.D. Salinger. That’s why I decided to tell you a few words about it today in class and I thought a short article would be useful.

Although J.D. Salinger has written many short stories, The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger’s only novel and his most notable work, earning him great fame and admiration.

At the beginning of his story, Holden Caulfield  is a student at Pencey Prep School, irresponsible and immature.  He has been expelled for failing four out of his five classes. Holden packs up and leaves the school in the middle of the night after an altercation with his roommate. He takes a train to New York, but does not want to return to his family and instead checks into the dilapidated Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute; he refuses to do anything with her and, after he tells her he just wants to talk, she becomes annoyed with him and leaves. However, he still pays her for her time. Holden spends a total of three days in the city, characterized largely by drunkenness and loneliness. At one point he ends up at a museum, where he contrasts his life with the statues of Eskimos on display. For as long as he can remember, the statues have been unchanging. These concerns may have stemmed largely from the death of his brother, Allie. Eventually, he sneaks into his parents’ apartment while they are away, to visit his younger sister, Phoebe, who is nearly the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. After leaving his parents’ apartment, Holden then drops by to see his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, in the middle of the night, and is offered advice on life and a place to sleep. Mr. Antolini tells Holden that it is the stronger man who lives humbly, rather than dies nobly, for a cause. This rebukes Holden’s ideas of becoming a “catcher in the rye,” a godlike figure who symbolically saves children from “falling off a crazy cliff” and being exposed to the evils of adulthood. Holden intends to move out west; he relays these plans to his sister, who decides she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, and when she becomes upset with him, he tells her that he will no longer go.

The Catcher in the Rye is written in first person from the point of view of its protagonist, Holden Caufield, a writing style known as stream of consciousness), which seems to follow the protagonist’s exact thought process.

The Catcher in the Rye has been listed as one of the best novels of the 20th century.

These are the only two pictures we have of Salinger. Salinger became reclusive after the publication of The Catcher in The Rye and  gradually withdrew from public view. Some people think that he was unable to deal with the traumatic nature of his war service.

Please visit http://www.anglarene.com/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=88 for more information on Bill Bryson.

For the TL1 pupils,

please watch the videos on Ellis Island (there are 3 articles) –> use “recherche” and type “Ellis Island” to watch them.

Situated in New York Harbour, the Statue of Liberty has become the proud symbol of the United States of America.The statue of the Goddess of Freedom carries the light of the spirit of enlightenment to the Free World.

Alexander Gustave Eiffel, whose tower later made him famous, built the statues ingenious iron frame construction supported by a central shaft.Around this framework a 2.4 millimeter thick copper coating was attached to the statue and it is mainly due to Eiffels frame that the monument has withstood the bays savage winter storms.

On the 28th October 1886, North Americas most important statue was inaugurated by President Grover Cleveland.The statue was the design of a young sculptor, Bartholdi, who had eagerly accepted the work due to the fact that the commission of his design of a large female statue for a lighthouse on the Suez Canal had not reached fruition.

At first, the statue received little love and affection.Indeed, New Yorkers used the statue’ s unveiling ceremony for a protest demonstration! Since then, however, it has most assuredly conquered the hearts of those who have seen it and it has become a symbol of freedom for the whole of America.

By Tobias Grey

Published: October 9 2009 22:15 | Last updated: October 9 2009 22:15 in The Financial Times

 

Pierre Soulages: ‘There are people who refuse to accept that you can create light on a black canvas’

 

“Painting is a play of opacities and transparencies.”  ~Pierre Soulages

Standing over six feet two inches tall and dressed in his habitual black, Pierre Soulages looks as though he’s just stepped out of one of his monumental all-black canvases, suspended like cavernous portals from the ceilings of Paris’s Pompidou Centre. It is a banner year for Soulages, who never fails to oversee the hanging of his paintings.

The Pompidou’s autumn show, which anticipates Soulages’s 90th birthday on December 24, is the biggest it has ever mounted for a living French artist. It looks back over more than 60 years of his painting, with emphasis on more recent developments in his work, which have led to him being dubbed the “painter of black and light”.

The exhibition brings together more than a hundred significant works dating from 1946 to the present, from the revolutionary walnut stain works painted between 1947 and 1949 to the “beyond black” oil paintings of recent years, most of the latter being shown for the first time.

At the same time, the Louvre is exhibiting a 300x235cm canvas that Soulages completed in July 2000. He specifically chose Le Salon Carré to display this luminous, striated work where black- and-white lines converge on an all-black background of broad, horizontal brush-strokes.

“I picked this room because the paintings are a mixture of Byzantine and Renaissance works,” Soulages says. “I wanted to underline the rupture, not only between Byzantine and Renaissance art, but also between Renaissance figurative art and my own style.”

One would venture to describe this style as “abstract” but Soulages disagrees. “Abstract art is a general term which is incredibly vague,” he says. “I wanted to call my first painting ‘concrete’ not ‘abstract’. But people told me concrete art designates paintings made up of geometric shapes. I replied, ‘If that’s how you define ‘concrete’ art, then you better find another term for ‘figurative’ art because geometric shapes are like figures.’ ”

With these words a smile creeps on to Soulages’ lips: he knows there are some battles that are not worth fighting. A confirmed “individualist”, Soulages has never aligned himself with any art movement or school, shunning the distraction of urban mondanities, or anything that might lead him to neglect his art.

“I’ve got nothing against people who are part of a group but I don’t like being bossed around,” he says. “Groups are interesting for sociologists or historians but artistically it’s a mistake because by grouping artists together you only become focused on what they share. What did artists like Manet or Sisley have in common? Impressionism; but what’s much more interesting is what makes each unique.”

It is one of the reasons Soulages has always looked to fabricate his own painting materials. Not content with the kind of “chic material” sold in art shops for “specific purposes”, he appropriates builder’s paintbrushes, book-binding tools, tanning knives, pieces of cardboard – even the soles of his own shoes.

Meanwhile, Soulages’s fascination for the artistic possibilities of the colour black dates back even further than he can remember: “A cousin of mine, who is 100 years old, told Pierre Encrevé, the curator of this exhibition, that when I was a boy I dipped my paintbrush in the ink-well and began to paint swathes of black on a white sheet of paper. When my family asked me what I was doing, apparently I replied: ‘Painting snow’. Of course that made everyone laugh. But I was a shy child and not trying to show off. Looking back now, I think I was trying to make the white paper appear whiter by laying down the black.”

As a boy growing up in the southern French town of Rodez, Soulages liked to paint the stark black branches of leafless trees. He used to visit centuries-old caves such as those of Pech-Merle in the Lot or Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne, where prehistoric hunting scenes worked in crushed charcoal had been made on the walls.

“It astounded me that for 340 centuries men have been painting in black in some of the most obscure places on earth, caves pitched in absolute darkness,” he says. “I wrote once that black is the colour of painting’s origin. I don’t think it’s possible to refute this.”

By his own recollection, Soulages started painting seriously in 1940. His first major exhibition was in Germany in 1948 as part of a collective of abstract painters. It was the first exhibition of abstract art in a German city since the rise and fall of the Nazis. At 27 years old, Soulages was easily the youngest artist to be exhibited. “There was Kupka, Domela, Hartung, Schneider,” he says. “[Gerard] Schneider would be 112 years old now, [Frantisek] Kupka 143 years old.”

But it was Soulages’s distinctive walnut stain painting that was chosen for the exhibition’s poster, a copy of which is on display at the Pompidou Centre. “It’s interesting because most American painters of the time got to know my work because of that poster,” he notes.

By 1954 the influential American art dealer Samuel Kootz was selling Soulages’s paintings all over the US, to large museums, but also to European expatriate filmmakers such as Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger. Such precocious success by a Frenchman was not universally welcomed by the American art world. But Soulages, who had been forewarned by the French painter and poet Francis Picabia that he would not want for enemies, shrugged it off.

“When you’re noticed very young you’re bound to have enemies; there is jealousy – it’s inevitable,” says Soulages, who last year sold a canvas for €1.5m, a record price for a living French artist. “There are also those who dislike you on an aesthetic level: people who don’t accept abstract art, for example, or who refuse to accept that you can create light on a black canvas.”

It was this last discovery, the result of an ultimately happy accident, that has sustained and nourished the past 30 years of the artist’s career. “It happened in 1979,” says Soulages, whose powers of recall are of a rare precision. “I was working on a painting and floundering around in a morass of paint, unable to understand what I was doing, but with something deep inside me compelling me to continue.”

Finally Soulages went to bed. When he woke up, what he saw “was not just a black painting any more but a painting where reflected light had been transformed and transmuted by the black surface. When I realised that light can emanate from the colour which has the biggest absence of light, I was both perturbed and profoundly moved. From that moment my eye changed and I’ve worked in this way ever since.”

The patient and deliberate way in which Soulages sets about creating continuity in his art goes hand-in-hand with his private life. Always there to give objective advice or provide le mot juste is Colette, his wife and muse of 67 years’ standing.

“I met a person with whom I have had a conversation that has never ceased,” says Soulages. “She had the same tastes as me, was interested in the same things, and we’ve continued to live together. I didn’t think it was going to last so long, but here we are.”

Earlier this year, the green light was given to a Soulages museum in the artist’s native Rodez; it is scheduled to open in 2012. For Soulages, that is just one more thing to look forward to. “I don’t live in the past,” he says. “What interests me is the next toile I want to do or the one I’m already working on.”

taken from : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2510df26-b462-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

see also : http://ow.ly/uqKW 

Soulages at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, October 14-March 8 2010.
www.centrepompidou.fr

Soulages at the Louvre, Paris, October 14-January 18 2010.
www.louvre.fr

Listen to Lou Reed on Poe’s poem : “The Raven” :

The Raven  (extrait)

Once upon a midnight dreary
as I pondered, weak and weary
over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore
while I nodded, nearly napping
suddenly there came a tapping
as of some one gently rapping
rapping at my chamber door
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered
“tapping at my chamber door
only this and nothing more.”

Muttering I got up weakly
always I’ve had trouble sleeping
stumbling upright my mind racing
furtive thoughts flowing once more
I, there hoping for some sunrise
happiness would be a surprise
loneliness no longer a prize
rapping at my chamber door
seeking out the clever bore
lost in dreams forever more
only this and nothing more
…
But the raven never flitting
still is sitting silent sitting
above a painting silent painting
of the forever silenced whore
and his eyes have all the seeming
of a demon’s that is dreaming
and the lamplight over him
streaming throws his shadow to the floor
I love she who hates me more
I love she who hates me more
and my soul shall not be lifted from that shadow
nevermoor

«The Raven – Le Corbeau», par Lou Reed et Lorenzo Mattotti, trad de l’américain par Claro, Seuil, 192 p., 28 euros.