Quasimodo

[Terrance]

So much time on Ralph's Estate and Zoyd's crumbling beach bungalow and
nothing said on the Retreat? In a Chapter in which the Boss-Lady alludes
to Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame? 
Kinda interesting, her phrase there. The retreat is not a book? Should
get the title right. Right? 

page 107 we drive into an "oil painting of a landscape" 

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Wizard of Oz, TV car commercial ... GRavity's
Rainbow is big into this stuff. 


and we have all those improvements, wiring, plumbing, and bad
investments 107

and those white washed walls on page 108 that are now weather-stained
almost readably reflecting the terrain ... 

Of course Hugo's novel begins with what is readable in a white-washed
wall. 
A word. 

It is difficult, let us suppose anyway, for us to imagine the
circumstances surrounding the appearance of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)
and its polemic on the beauty and cultural peculiarity of medieval
church architecture. By Henry! Queen in Heaven! We are Educated Men!
Still, we are accustomed to the great cathedrals being treated like
museums or objects in museums (BY IBSEN! It's Mary's  DOLL  HOUSE). We
expect them to be  preserved from the contamination of unsuitable
improvements. A little digging and we begin wonder who in/on (my Spanish
prepositions ae killing me)  earth would approve and sanction marriages
to structures unfit to hang from her carriage clanging into dust?
Re-plumbed? Wasn't she True?  The Virgin doesn't need re-plumbing she
never leaks. What's need of rewiring? Won't the Light of the world pour
into her bosom and all who gather there? And if she must have a bit of
polishing, trimming, surely we will not hack away at her without the
considerable publicity supported by the views of those considered to
have authority on questions of style and authenticity?  

And, when you are finished cleaning Notre-Dame, get to work on that
filthy ceiling in Sistine. 

In Hugo's day cathedrals might be rebuilt, re-designed, torn down,
married to ugly satanic mills, sold to the devil. They cleaned the
churches and they damaged them. Every Appalled and Blackening Church,
Blake reminds us, was an excuse for a young kid in black lungs crying
"weep! weep!"  on the corner with his brush. Most appalling of all, at
least Hugo thought so, clerical authorities were free to have precious
monuments colored, red, blue, yellow, rainbowed over with plaster-based
paints, a great fashion at the time. Like the cleaning and painting of
our very own White House in Washington, texture and detail were erased
or rather filled in like so many candy drilled cavities or pot-holes on
56th street between 10th and First avenues. 

Shall we have a plot summary? 

Frolio, archdeacon of ND, becomes enamored of Esmeralda, a gypsy dancer,
the favorite of the idle Parisian crowd. 

TBC