The Culture of our Cities interview series

Can urban culture continue to be a site for human flourishing? Do we need a new vision of city life, of urban co-existence? How can we transform our cities in order to meet our needs and, also, satisfy our spirits?

The Thomas More Institute puts these questions to Montrealers from a range of professional backgrounds during a lecture series called The Culture of Our Cities. The series is in full swing, but there is still time to check out the these speakers:

May 15^nd – Sherry Simon, professor at Concordia university French department professor.

May 22^nd – Lise Bissonnette, journalist, novelist and director general of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Quebec.

May 29th – Julia Gersovitch, architect specializing in the conservation and restoration of historical urban landscapes.

June 12^th – Linda Leith, Founder and Artistic Director of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.

All the interviews take place at 7pm at the Grande Bibliothèque. For more complete bios of the speakers , check out the official website here.

I have already shared some of my own musings on how to build cities that satisfy our spirits here, and I’m eager to see how others answer these questions. I definitely want to check out Sherry Simon this Tuesday, lured by the titles of her two books: Translating Montreal and Le trafic des langues.

I have become the default translator at in my all-French office and it’s been way more challenging that I expected. After some attempts that were about as eloquent as Monoc Armand with the OED, I figured out that the trick is to extract the meaning from the French phrase, and then recreate it in English as though I had just had the idea myself and wanted to express it for the first time. In any case, it has forced me to deconstruct the overripe buzz-words of the workplace. It’s also made me wonder if living in two languages provides us with better tools for distilling meaning from our surroundings.

The series is free but reservations are required. To ensure your place, please phone TMI to reserve your tickets at 514.935.9585