Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

The Professor and Other Writings

New York

Harper Collins

2010

"The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol aspects of our relationship became fodder, in the presence of others, for a catharsis at once reviving and entertaining."

And easy enough, too, to deliver like a volley of shellfire, the caricature version: the Professor as Hoary Mean Thing, camp, supersized and frightful, with all the glaring, eyeball-popping, Joan-Crawford-as-Mildred-Pierce mannerisms intact. I've delivered such blasts many times over the past thirty years. The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol aspects of our relationship became fodder, in the presence of others, for a catharsis at once reviving and entertaining. The Professor, I had to admit, made great copy. There were enough details--Flaubertian or Freudian--to make one feel marvelously suave and blasé after the fact: the Very Weird Long Grey Braid; the Withered Leg, the Loaded Pistol in the Bedside Drawer (often to be taken out and examined during lovemaking); the Room in Her House One Was Never Allowed to Enter; the Gruesome Crime-Scene Photos, Bloody and Horrific, she once showed me (again after sex) from a murder trial she had been involved in once as an expert witness.
(pp. 200-1)

Architecture::Labyrinth

Reading

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

05/18/2011