GRGR(8) Discussion Opener

[stencil]

>...do the English really make such awfull candy?
In addition to some perfectly normal sweets, yes. It seems to be one
of those national-identity things, like Belgian lambic beer or schmalz
herring or kim chee, and if foreigners don't like it, that's tough. A
while back Peake Freen (sp?), the cookie peple, hired John Cleese to
get weird on "adult" cookie flavors for an ad cycle... he was
rhapsodizing about Smokey Orange and Banana Tansy, just like Darlene.
Straining a bit, you could hear TRP warning you not to get too
complacent about what's beneath the surfaces of the bonbons to come.

>Does anyone have any thoughts about TRP's use of the word "cunt"? 
No denying it's jarring here.  Perhaps... these pages - five sections
- just before the Advent Service sequence are another second-order
curve, sprung out of Mexico's solitary lust-reverie, tracing through
hilarity the development of their coupling, at the peak the moment of
stasis in Jessica's own love-reverie, and then the mirrored descent
through paranoia and emerging through Jessica's girl-chatter, fussing
with lingerie, and "A Pipe, I suppose...."  Although it's stark, it's
honest, a good old word.  The OED skirts around it but "cunniculus"
and "coney" and maybe even "cwm" are available, old family.  The books
talk of "running eye" splices and the "groove" of the rope but sailors
know better.  Perhaps TRP wanted to start the run in honesty;  a few
paragraphs further, in rueful jealousy, Roger says "labia." 


>Is there anything significant about the name "Yrjo"?
Surely Yrjo... king? The EncycBrit talks about a Finnish politician of
that name who made some bad guesses at the turn of the century about
how much appeasement of Russia his people would tolerate;  Romania's
King in 1878 was a German who had been peacefully elected a few years
before; in 1881 he changed his name to become Carol I.  Nobody else
cared about Bessarabia in 1878 except the Turks and the Russians, who
weren't doing kings at the moment. If TRP wasn't straining for the
pun, maybe he just got careless.  Now MarJoe, that's a different kind
of healer altogether. 

===========