Keeping up -

After the first poetry class, I feel encouraged enough to work on something to take in next week. Class lasts 2 hours, so there should be enough time for everyone to read, even if all 15 students bring poems. The teacher is able to keep the class discussion focused, without making his guidance too obvious.

Keeping up with music, knitting (the sweater is growing nicely), working on a class reunion, and other aspects of daily life means I'm not reading many books. The New Yorker and the Economist arrive each week without fail, and recently, just to complicate things, I subscribed to Paris Match. The magazine is the French equivalent of People or Us, and almost qualifies as a guilty pleasure - while catching up on the latest about M. and Mme. Sarkozy (she has been on the cover of Match at least three times since the wedding) I'm learning new vocabulary and contemporary expressions. Really. (For another approach to contemporary French, see this website.)

Match does cover current events differently from American media. Its pictures of the riots in Myanmar were far more comprehensive and disturbing than anything I saw here.

So I think about Paris when the magazine arrives, and promise myself I'll get the French dictionary out before I settle down with the latest issue, instead of trying to get the stories from context. But it's so hard to stop reading long enough to look up that ONE word that I should know anyway...