Swearing in French in Guerrero

We'll get back to Marie de l'Incarnation soon, I hope, because her story is nuts. She was a powerhouse, a dynamo, a great teacher, a prolific letter-writer, and a nun-scholar-philologist in the wilds of old Canada. In the meantime, here is a story about swearing like a (Québec) Frenchman while wintering south of two borders.

Québecois swearing is justly famous for its outrageousness. If the offense or inconvenience you are suffering is not too great, you can of course just mutter a clipped 'marde' under your breath and have done with it. If, however, the flurry from your neighbor's souffleuse just blew your tasty string of tire d'érable (I remember loving that as a kid; thank God those teeth were temporary) right into the bits of hair sticking out from under your tuque, your ire is unlikely to be fully vented after a mere monosyllable (we think our four-letter-words are handy stress relievers: imagine having ten or fifteen syllables to let off that steam). Instead of a tiny clenched fistful of choices and one short puff of air, Québec Francophones have at their disposal the vast vocabulary of four hundred years of North American Catholic history from which to fashion not merely obscene, but elaborately, flamboyantly, nonsensically obscene multi-part jurons/sacrés combining every religious term conceivable. In English, people sometimes murmur 'Oh, God,' or 'Jesus,' (whether knowingly/deliberately or completely unconsciously) whereas in Québec the would-be swearer has the entire Mass, the Old and New Testaments, two thousand years of saints, all entries main and sub- in the Catechism, and every last detail of ecclesiastical vestments, architecture and ornamentation from which to choose his sacrés.

Now, baptism records notwithstanding, no one is actually Catholic anymore in Québec. That stopped in the 60s, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still objectionable in polite society to yell a series of religious words interspersed with terms alluding to the body's copulatory and excretory functions. So there are euphemisms. Plenty of them. Calvaire (Calvary) and câlisse (chalice) can become calette, calvette, caltour, calvasse, calverasse, câlif/caliphe (caliph or qaliph), câlique and, with a dig at reference to the Huguenot Protestant portion of the province's settlers, Calvin, Calvinasse, Calvinisse, Calvinouche, and so on.

In order not to offend old ladies by saying 'tabarnac' which is what you would say if you were a Québecois trying to mutter 'tabernacle' while frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible

Rue Calvin in Québec City,

you might instead grumble tabarnache, tabarnouche, tabarniche, tabarnane, tabaslac, or even tabarouette (= ta barouette).

(Sa Barouette.)
(Jean à de longues moustaches. Je répète: Jean à de longues moustaches.)

If, however, you were less worried about people overhearing and being offended by your swearing because you were somewhere no one would understand the polite words, either, such as frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible Calle No. 2 in Acapulco, you might be less inclined toward restraint and let all three real syllables fly, giving yet another reason for Mexican resort workers, street vendors, and taxicab drivers to continue to refer to loud Francophone Quebeckers as 'tabernacos,' via analogy to 'nacos'

NaCo T-shirts

which is the Mexican version of 'chav' and 'joual' and just as classist as these, but with the advantage of having a fair bit of racism mixed in, as well.

('There is no racism in Mexico. -Said this câline of a tabarname of a calvénousse of a baptême of a naco.')

But, just as other vicious words have been retranslated and refurbished in the past few decades as emblems of pride rather than vehicles of derision or hate, so, too, has naquismo as an identity been reclaimed and self-consciously turned on its head in all its garish glory. For the past decade there has been a NaCo clothing company (which was even quite trendy a couple years ago in distinctly non-naco circles with t-shirts such as the designs in this posting and 'Ser Naco Es Chido' and 'M is for Mojado' ['wetback']), with outlets in both Mexico and the U.S., not to mention online.

According to cultural critics such as Carlos Monsiváis and others, however, the word is simply too nasty from its very origin to merit rehabilitation. Most agree the word comes from 'Totonaco' or, possibly, 'Nacohuatl/Nahuatl,' and thus always contains a racial element when used by comparatively cultured, educated and light-skinned Mexicans to refer not only to those with less refinement and schooling, but more indigenous blood. 'Naco' for Monsiváis is 'proletario, lumpenproletario, pobre, sudoroso, el pelo grasiento y el copete alto, el perfil de cabeza de Palenque, vestido a la moda de hace seis meses, vestido fuera de moda. Naco es los anteojos oscuros a la media noche, el acento golpeado, la herencia del peladito y el lépero, el diente de oro. Naco es el insulto que una clase dirige a otra.'

Now, I for one am about as sick of feigned folksyism as I could be, but it is one thing deliberately and inconsistently to drop one's G's from the present progressive in an attempt to get the lumpenproletariat to vote for you ('Guysngals, our regulatory system is outdated...there's somethin that's goin on in our world, in our nation...that needs some shakin up and fixin') and another altogether to be at ease with and proud of all the sweat, callouses, and disapproving looks your naco or joual heritage has earned you. Had someone suggested to me a few years ago that there would be a Democratic presidential candidate of African ancestry, to which the Republican response was going to be Class War, I would have suggested to the speaker that he perhaps 'didn't inhale' a great many more times than Bill Clinton - and quite possibly didn't do that inhaling very, very recently.

Monastic of the Day!

(Not him, obviously. But weren't the 80s ghastly, though?
Leggings and miniskirts, oh my.
And a headband, no less!)

In what seems to be becoming a regular feature here, today's featured religious* is the Venerable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, 1599-1672, who started out this life in Tours and departed it in an Ursuline convent in New France, which is alot like Québec only with a great deal fewer Frites-Alors, much less poutine, and not even close to as much or as many habitant and habitants.

Both sides of my family, the French ones and the English ones, came over to North America early. This could mean they were desperate, adventurous, bored, reckless, in danger of incarceration, excessively fond of lengthy boat travel, or all these in varying measures. I know a lot about the English side: they fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and sent letters telling about this. I know less about the earliest French arrivals, and I suspect it is because they are the ones who gave the women in our family the facial hair, and the less known about them, the less rancour towards the dead will arise. Still, though, I love the history of Québec/New France/Nouvelle France as much as I love that of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, so while rummaging around online for stuff about the former, I was reminded of the story of the Filles du Roi, in which the above Mother Marie played a part.

(The Roi Whose Filles We're Talking About.
Somehow this style never caught on in Trois-Rivières.
They were still probably wearing headbands.)

Firstly, it should be said that Filles du Roi are not at all the same as filles de joie, who figured in earlier posts and had far better wardrobes, not to mention restaurant choices, even after Escoffier, than the habitants of the Canadian wilderness.

(As you can see from the rug and the furniture
in this painting by honorary Canadian Cornelius Krieghoff,
imported spouses were also forced to endure shopping at Ikea, which was
even more horrific when Karl XI

was in charge of Sweden
than it is now.)

Unlike filles de joie, Filles du Roi were not career women; their job - once they moved to the New World and found a husband (which tended to happen within a month or so after disembarkation) - was to be a wife and mother, which, alongside religious and camp-follower, was one of the three main career trajectories available to women at the time. Despite the arduous passage across the Atlantic, New Franceian Hausfrau could well have seemed the middle-ground option for marriageable girls with a moderate, though not overweening, sense of adventure and a similarly underwhelming set of marriage prospects.

The Filles du Roi were recruited and imported from 1663 to 1673, beginning in northern cities like Paris, Rouen, and New Rochelle. The purpose of the programme was to populate the colony, which would eventually provide new soldiers to defend France's holdings against Iroquois and English alike. Moreover, having a wife, family, house, land - not to mention livestock, two barrels of salted meat, and dowry from the King - would in theory serve to keep more of the colony's male population where they were instead of following the trend of leaving New France to return home after their three years of service. Though there were only 700, or 852, or 1000 women shipped in during those years, the French population of New France was itself only about 2500 in 1663 (as contrasted with English North America, which already had 100,000 inhabitants), with only 1 percent of New France territory being used by the settlers, so the resulting marriages and considerable progeny (you only got a 300-livre annual pension if you stalled at 10 children, but 400 if you made it past a clean dozen) could indeed eventually constitute a relatively significant bulwark against English encroachment once the children reached soldiering age. In 1671 alone, about 700 babies were born to the new families, and by the end of the ten-year importation of Filles du Roi, the sex ratio in Nouvelle France was more or less even. By 1754, at the start of the Seven Years' War, or the Fourth Intercolonial War, or the Guerre de la Conquête, or the 'French and Indian War,' the 'Indians' at least had some Frenchmen to fight alongside them.

All that notwithstanding.



Some of the girls were not as ready for the privations of Canadian homesteading as were others. They got a quick remedial education in whatever practical domestic arts they lacked while awaiting introduction to suitable suitors, plus a ration of pins, needles, thread, taffeta, and scissors among other things. They did not, however, receive a pair of Sorels or experience in wood-chopping or fence-building. Just as the Filles preferred garçons who already had une habitation set up and ready for move-in (look, I love the Canadiens as much as you do and, honestly, probably more so, but that really is the boring reason they're called The Habs: steady settlers with land and a cabin. Homesteaders. Pea soup. Stability and stoicism, not high-sticking), the male colonists were in need more of a sturdy helpmeet than a piano-playing bourgeoise.

Enter Marie Guyart the Ursuline.

(And also another entry, since this one got away from me.)


*And for the irreligious among you, 'religious' in the nominative way is different than the adjectival version. Flat-earthers, for example, or snake-charming charismatics, no matter how ardent their faith in their faith, would only be adjectivally religious, i.e., religious people, a religious population, rather than 'a religious' like Mother Marie, who took vows/joined an order/consecrated her life. It's not biased language, I assure you, and it certainly doesn't prove the earth isn't flat.

The Tribulations of Ti

Not to be excessively bloggy, but for those of you who don't believe in a God, here's your proof He exists: the crazy, *******tent-as-he-is-*********iacal executive director of Fort Ticonderoga (yes, Virginia, there is a Fort Ticonderoga!) is finally announcing he is finally stepping down, having estranged himself and thereby the Fort from the friendship, largesse, and presence of benefactors and former board president and member Deborah Clarke Mars and Forrest Mars. Fort attendance is down overall (except for this year, which had 250th-anniversary events for the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga [July 8, 1758] in the 'French and Indian War' [1754-63]), charitable contributions are way down due to the departure of the Marses, the Fort's largest donors, and, with recent media coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times, Mr. Westbrook's plans to sell off the Fort's artwork (banned by New York law, by the way, under the Fort's charter) reached a wide audience.



And if you have any question as to why such a nice fort would have kept switching hands, it is apparently because a candle and a groggy wife do not a sound defensive strategy make.

Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)

Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.

...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.

But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.

At any rate.

Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.

However.

Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.

That fact notwithstanding.

I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.

So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.

But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.

Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.

However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.

But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.

Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'

The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:

'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'

And likewise something like this:

'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'

Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.

I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.

Confusing but Comforting

I am a bit mystified. There has been an odd surge in numbers of people reading this goofy blog in the last week, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

Here is what I have covered in that time period:

-Catholics
-Compassion
-Commandments (yikes, eh?)
-Cats
-Cats
-Cats
-Courtesans
-Cooking
-Canada
-Cohen
-Campesinos in California (four of whom have died in the past month), and
-Comedy, even.

So you can see why I'm shocked. I didn't once cover Angelina Jolie, or how to make a million dollars in a week. I can only imagine what will happen when I get to the letter D.

Clavardage and Cohen

Completely trivial post, but:

My new absolute favorite word is the Québecisme clavarder. I don't know what the Académie Franςaise has to say about it, but it's a portmanteau word (or mot-valise if you're speaking French while throwing French words around) comprised of bavarder, to chat + clavier, and it hopes, on the heels of courriel's success (courrier + électronique = email) to replace chatter, tchatter, and even tchatcher, for electronic chat.

Not that it matters, but it gets my vote.

To celebrate clavarder's victory over my heart, here is my favorite stanza from my favorite song ('Joan of Arc') by the irrefutably (and even Québecoisically) Canadian Leonard Cohen:


'Then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And high above the wedding guests
He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.'

It Goes On...

This is from the Weather Underground. I wanted to go down today after work and take pictures of the rhododendrons and bonsai at the rhododendron and bonsai gardens in Federal Way. (That's a city, not a manner of doing things, in this state.) But there is no sun. There was what we call here a 'sunbreak,' perhaps even two, but not enough to justify my trek.

5-Day Forecast for ZIP Code 98117

Customize Your Icons!

Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday
56° F | 43° F 13° C | 6° C	63° F | 45° F 17° C | 7° C	59° F | 45° F 15° C | 7° C	56° F | 45° F 13° C | 7° C	58° F | 45° F 14° C | 7° C
Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Partly Cloudy	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation
Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly
Tomorrow is forecast to be Warmer than today.

I love many things about Seattle. And I think that, despite our thousands of new cookie-cutter condo developments and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments that could just as easily be in Anaheim or Shanghai, there still remains much here to set it apart from other cities of similar size, latitude, demographics, etc. And all you hear about our rainfall is not true: we don't get an extraordinary amount. We are 50-something, I think, in US cities: all the leaders are in the Southeastern United States. What we do get is months upon months of unremitting gloom. It's not especially cold here, either, particularly considering that we're almost in Canada. But what our snuggle with the 49th Parallel does mean is that our winter days are as brief as they should be at this latitude. When you add in the fact that we get none of those glorious brisk sunny days most other people get intermittently through the winter, you are faced with the reality that our lot is a bunch of short dark days: even when the sun is out, it's not, and then it's back to complete darkness at half-past-four or something.

What also have is a lot of bars, and a lot of suicides. But then spring comes, and there is a riot of color everywhere, including every conceivable and comforting shade of green. The streets are lined with cherry blossoms, and rhododendron bushes and trees bloom from white to purple in yards everywhere. By the time the two months of summer are upon us, no one in the Puget Sound region cooks a single meal inside, and it takes triple the time to get anywhere, as all the bridges are up and down constantly to allow for the the thousands of sailboats, accompanied by canoes, kayaks, bowriders, converted liveaboard tugs, dinghies, trawlers on hiatus, and the lamentable cigarette boats to pass under in hoardes. White legs that would shame Dublin are everywhere, not a play is produced or a concert offered, and tourists are the only people eating in restaurants. The failed suicides of February are out at Greenlake in preposterously colored clingy clothes, thirty pounds lighter, completely sober, and practicing asanas with the emotional stability and optimism of any Self-Actualized Man worth his mudra.

It's a shocking way of life.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise

Fascinatingly enough (or not), my reunion with the Blackberry occurred late Tuesday of last week. In all my excitement I might well have failed to notice, anyway, but had we renewed our vows the day previous instead, there would have been a three-hour interruption in our recommitment ceremony and ensuing celebration.

For me (and that I am alone in this perspective as in so many others is proven by the absurd furore this caused), a couple hours twice a year of uncertainty as to whether I have any incoming emails seems a manageable risk and tolerable cost when weighed against the other 8750-something other hours of instantly-updated connectivity. Moreover, that the outage's scope is attributable to the fact that all data sent by all Blackberry users, regardless of carrier, must pass through RIM's two network operations centers in Canada, makes me so happy I wish I could send money, flowers, and handwritten love notes to Research in Motion directly. Did last Monday's short-lived BB breakdown bring the US and global economies to a crushing, grinding halt? No. But I find the idea that thousands of advance-copy HR memos on new breakroom policies and rough-draft PowerPoint presentations from hemorrhoid-treatment salesmen had their full, momentous impact delayed because something went wrong in Waterloo terribly, terribly amusing.

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...