The aptitude for love is something learned. The slow sinfonietta of touch, the adagio of the amorous abrasion and the crescendi of frenzied release are the animal instincts that in the right hands could be elevated into an art.
Stretching the metaphor into music is a conceit I cannot claim. The above overwrought description is a paraphrase from the 19th century manuel de l'amour of Don Alphonse de Forcalquier. Its strange title Broyage et de Poussée (too euphemistic to be adequately translatable) says it all.
When Faun Roberts sailed to Le Havre on the S.S. Gordon Freis she had little or no experience in matters of love. A pastor's daughter from rural Pennsylvania, she was taught at an early age how to quiet the trilling of the heart and the tremor of the pudenda.
Nothing stirs the appetite more lavishly than abnegation and nothing yields more fully to abandon than indulgence deferred. No sooner did Roberts reach Paris when she got spanked into the obvious insight that there were greater pleasures in life than church bingo and pie.
De Forcalquier was all the rage on Rue de Renne and Montparnasse was the place where the kettle of heedless copulation smoldered over the most blistering of flames. If ever there were a textbook on the materials and techniques of raunchy misbehavior it was Broyage et de Poussée and the formally monolingual Roberts was quick to conjugate through its knotty and idiosyncratic prose.
If only American students today could learn languages as quickly and as eagerly.
Maybe a textbook illustrated with the works of Faun Roberts would do the trick.
Maybe
When Faun Roberts sailed to Le Havre on the S.S. Gordon Freis she had little or no experience in matters of love. A pastor's daughter from rural Pennsylvania, she was taught at an early age how to quiet the trilling of the heart and the tremor of the pudenda.
Nothing stirs the appetite more lavishly than abnegation and nothing yields more fully to abandon than indulgence deferred. No sooner did Roberts reach Paris when she got spanked into the obvious insight that there were greater pleasures in life than church bingo and pie.
De Forcalquier was all the rage on Rue de Renne and Montparnasse was the place where the kettle of heedless copulation smoldered over the most blistering of flames. If ever there were a textbook on the materials and techniques of raunchy misbehavior it was Broyage et de Poussée and the formally monolingual Roberts was quick to conjugate through its knotty and idiosyncratic prose.
If only American students today could learn languages as quickly and as eagerly.
Maybe a textbook illustrated with the works of Faun Roberts would do the trick.
 |
| The Deviating Transcript, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1925 |
Maybe
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