Learning Resource Center

Other institutions would have simply called this building the library. There was a sophisticated audio-visual system wherewith students could watch lectures repeatedly. I suppose at the time, it was state-of-the-art, and gave the administration the justification for assigning an extra-fancy name to the facility. It also housed classrooms and equipment for telecommunications courses.

It was 1975. I was a French major. One of the first classes I had here was French Phonetics. Carolyn N., a classmate who fast became and still remains a dear friend, was as captivated as I by our Korean professor’s ability to roll her uvular r’s. They were in the same moment percussive and dulcet. I can’t account for their allure, except that they might have evoked a kind of fond nostalgia for happy days studying French in Québec, where Arthémise Roome, the Classroom Eccentric and Lady Novelist from Mandeville, enthralled us with her accent and anecdotes. At any rate, when Carolyn and I left class every day, we forewent mastery of all other sounds, as we redoubled our efforts to get our uvulae to warble like Mme. Park’s. This process would have entailed all manner of grunting and groaning, as we experimented with different laryngial positions, hoping to happen upon our professor’s felicitous technique. All this as we traversed the Prayer Gardens. There would have been other students passing us, en route to their classes. What must they have thought?

Nowadays—31 years later—I can only produce a pitiful approximation by pertubating any phlegm that might be in place in my throat. (What must the neighbors think?)