Amorous Adventures Extended Se

[Sandi Loisel]

Itoo have eaten it in Paris, in the little bistros and in the much-revered establishments, but I first learned to eat it in Bulgaria, its native habitat. It was a girl, of course, who initiated me into the mysteries of unmysterious, simple yogurt. Clarissa, the Bulgarian beauty, would launch into long dissertations on how she could thank a steady (and oh, so easy!) diet of yogurt for her beautiful skin, and en passant mentioned that one has to be just as beautiful inside as out.

Not that I didn't also see her devote herself on occasion to a grilled breast of baby lamb, cut into tiny sections, salted and peppered, and served on a wooden plank with halved tomatoes around it. Or to a grilled whole goose liver, which is of tremendous proportion and delightful flavor in Bulgaria. Ladies with a hearty appetite always appeal to me. Love of good food is a hopeful augury.

Naturally, I should like to go on talking about Clarissa; but I feel that, since you are more interested in eatables than in my amorous adventures, I had better tell you all about yogurt. I'll resent it, however, if you think that Clarissa wasn't adorable enough to eat, and I shall return to her later. But first, yogurt:

Let me come right out and say that I know next to nothing about traditional French music. In fact, it was only this week that I the discovered meaning of musette, a French term to describe the accordion-heavy, urban folk music popular in 1930s Paris. I also have no comprehension of the language. Yet my cultural ignorance was no hindrance to enjoying The Romance of Paris, a terrific new disc by the Vermont-based cabaret/jazz ensemble Deja Nous.

Led by French transplant Jean-Jaques Psaute, the band's airy swing seduces with a distinctly European flair. Pianist Nate Venet's playful ivory work on opener "C'est si bon" is captivating, and bassist Mike Sperber provides clever rhythmic punctuation. Psaute's charmingly rugged voice is the real focus, however. Like a francophone version of Dick Van Dyke's Mary Poppins chimney sweep character, he bowls you over with affable melody.

"Beaucoup de vent" is an impeccably romantic ballad, which I imagine to be about unrequited love of one variety or another. Of course, it could be about flyfishing for all I know. Still, it sounds romantic as all get-out. "Mademoiselle Maman" is likewise starry-eyed, the kind of tune that makes you sigh deeply between sips of wine. Percussionist Matt Guzowski's hi-hat shuffle and restrained cymbal swells give the track a breezy quality that nicely complements Psaute's tender vocal delivery.

The pace picks back up with "Les Champs Elysees," a charming, up-tempo romp featuring an a cappella trumpet impersonation. The brief "solo" is raunchy and fun, somewhere between Louis Armstrong and comedian Steve Martin. It also serves to show that that Psaute and co. don't take themselves too seriously.

An atonal piano figure precedes the saucy bounce of "Ne me quitte pas," which runs from vibrant double-time to laid-back jazz noir. The cut contains several passages that wouldn't sound out of place in a Pink Panther film. Sperber's frantic bass lines are once again a highlight, as he throbs and weaves around the multiple time shifts.

Deja Nous are so engaging, they'd probably impress even "freedom fry"-munching conservatives. While The Romance of Paris might not compare to a real-life continental romp, it might be the perfect soundtrack to amorous adventures in your own province. Hear them live August 20 & 21 at the FlynnSpace in Burlington.

Haigh has created two series for television: Looking, which had a two-year run (2014-2016) on HBO, followed the amorous adventures of three gay men living in San Francisco (played by Frankie J. Alvarez, Jonathan Goff, and Murray Bartlett) and The North Water, a 2021 arctic whaling drama for the BBC and AMC here in the States. He says that working for the small screen took some adjustment for him. So does the current trend toward replacing theatergoing with streaming.

The joke turns out to be on Monk, however, because My Pafology (soon retitled Fuck), turns out to be a huge bestseller that nabs a multimillion-dollar film deal. The more he tries to push his stunt to the point of absurdity, the more it succeeds, and the complications of his duplicity build to an award-ceremony climax.

All of Us Strangers is directed by Andrew Haigh, who is best known for the British films Weekend (about an extended gay sexual encounter) and 45 Years (about an elderly married couple having doubts about their love), and the HBO series Looking, which followed the amorous adventures of three gay men in San Francisco. He also wrote the screenplay for All of Us Strangers, based on the Japanese novel Strangers, by Taichi Yamada.

The movie is reminiscent of both Weekend and 45 Years in its exploration of how gay men deal with attraction and how tragedies of the past leave inescapable scars. As open as Haigh gets with sex and emotions, his films are largely quiet and removed. Both Scott and Pascal deliver winning portrayals, but they speak tentatively, leaving much unsaid and unexplained. Still, by mixing ghosts with real people, Haigh manages to heighten the psychological drama without noise. Watching All of Us Strangers is an intense, profoundly sad experience.

The latest issue of Arthurian Literature is, with the exception of one article, concerned with the subject of comedy in Arthurian literature. The individual essays deal with a large number of texts, ranging from the works of Chretien to the late Irish Eachtra an Amadain Mhoir. Despite the eclecticism of the contents it is clear that the texts have more in common than simply their Arthurianness. Time and again the contributors find themselves engaging with the idea of reecriture, primarily of Chretien, whose poems, not themselves lacking in comedy, form a series of narratives, motifs and topoi, which later texts self-consciously subvert, knowingly allude to, multiply and distort. Another theme is the concept of subversion itself; the very texts which extol and exemplify knightly behavior contains elements, often linked to the fabliau genre, which question or critique the tenets of the chivalric project. Contributors are often well aware of the potential problem of cultural specificity: do we laugh at the same things that the medieval audience found funny? Donald Hoffman notes that for the modern reader, the image of Guenevere laughing so much at the spectacle of Dinadan dressed in women's clothing, that she falls down on the floor, is considerably funnier than the humiliation of the hapless outsider-knight. Fourthly, though comedy as a modality is considered antithetical to tragedy, the effect of the comic is frequently to point forward to the end of the Arthurian polity, to the point where all smiles cease; as Elizabeth Sklar comments, "in the end, the 'smylyng' seems a little strained, and the 'laughyng' sounds, perhaps, a hollow note" (l97).

Nevertheless there is much fun to be had on the way. Angelica Rieger notes the similarities between the adventure of the lion in Yvain and the concentration in comic-strips on privileged moments in the protagonist's life, depending for their effect on brevity and speed. The parrot in Le Chevalier du Papegau in Marilyn Lawrence's study is an unequivocally jolly character. Identified with the figure of the professional minstrel, commenting on and recording Arthur's prowess he also plays the role of the Helper, warning, prophesying and consoling. Norris Lacy shows how Gawain's "quintessentially 'Gawainesque'" (68) behavior in La Vengeance Raguidel often thwarts our textual expectations, and argues that burlesque is by no means a feature only of late texts. Clearly the outline of Gawain's traditional character had been fixed as early as 1220. Gawain is also the focus of Peter Noble's comparison of comedy in Les Merveilles de Rigomer and Hunbaut. In the Merveilles, Noble argues, the author develops Chretien's ironic attitude towards Lancelot, making sure that Gawain remains superior to the more-recently arrived hero. Lancelot is found hard at work in the kitchens of Rigomer, where he has become "gros et bestial" (fat and beastly) and now uncommonly proud of his baking skills (82), a sight which reduces Gawain to tears. Knights are fooled by cunning damsels; the chivalric world is cheerfully, but unmaliciously mocked, while in Hunbaut the comedy is more serious, the butt of the humor is the readiness of knights to adopt uncourtly methods in order to achieve success.

Christine Ferlampin-Acher's substantial study of the marvelous and the comic attends to the comedy which accompanies the marvelous when meaning is troubled by characters disagreeing on what they have seen, or a solitary character catches single glimpses of a wonderful object. Later romances depend on making wonder banal, the inscribed reader often nudging the audience into laughter as an appropriate response. Elizabeth Archibald is not the only contributor to draw upon classical formulations of comedy, noting that anagnorisis, the recognition scene, contributes to the gaiety of the early days at Arthur's court where, in Malory's version, the revelation of the parentage and attributes of Tor offers a readerly satisfaction which is also part of the pleasure of the Tale of Sir Garethand other "Fair Unknown" stories. Recognition is tactfully managed in the case of Galahad. Malory, as his sources did also, wisely eschews any recognition scene between Mordred and Arthur, "this one was better left out" (16).

The darker tone of Archibald's initial article is increasingly echoed in later essays. Karen Pratt's thoughtful discussion of humor in Silence corrects a number of mistranslations and misapprehensions among earlier scholars at the same time as she notes the amusing intertextual relationship of the romance with Chretien, and posits the idea of "intergeneric comedy," a concept which recurs in different guises in a number of chapters, particularly where the irruption of the fabliauesque is noted. It is not just fabliau, but also clerical misogynist writing and didactic literature about women with which Silence is in dialogue; Pratt notes the ways in which the "proto-feminist portrayal of the exemplary 'masculine' hero" beloved of modern reception is challenged by "the essentialist narrator and mysogynous (sic) characters" (102). The more serious implications of comedy, those which point towards the collapse of chivalric ideals and the final catastrophe are operative in Benedicte Milland-Bove's discussion of Guerrhet's amorous misadventures in the Prose Lancelot. The comedy of Guerrhet's failure to persuade a succession of damsels to accompany him on his adventures gives way to his abduction and rape of a woman whose husband he kills. Milland-Bove shows how sexual imbalance mirrors social imbalance, how the comedy of repetition, and Guerrhet's figuration as a comic antithesis of Lancelot is brought into question as the fabliau world impinges on the chivalric, and the violence escalates. Guerrhet becomes embroiled in a Damsel-in-a-Tent episode, a motif which is a site for comedy when Lancelot or Gawain are involved, but which here goes horribly wrong.

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