When I was a freshman in high school planning on attending Yale University as a French major with a Law minor, I decided if I ever ran up against a fellow named Jean-Paul, I was done for. My fate would be sealed that day. If Jean-Paul would have me then I would be Mrs. John-Paul pour grand ou mal. If my life were a novel written by a good author, this Jean-Paul thingy would have been the foreshadowing of the John Paul who did eventually have me. But this John Paul did not have me the typical French way of have women. This John Paul would be John Paul II : The Pope who received me into the Catholic Church in the year 2000, along with Mr. P and our infant, Roger Kimball's future daughter-in-law .
When I was in finishing school studying art my tastes in men's names had moved a bit north of France. There (or it is then?) if a Sven had ever asked for my hand in a twirl around the dance floor, I would have granted him it for life. After finishing school came art school. Art school turned out to be so strange that for survival's sake, my tastes in men's names shifted quickly from the exotic to the more mundane. Since Scott's toiletry supplies and Scott's lawn care products were to be a mainstay in the life of the Boston suburbs I was imagining for myself, I thought a Scott would do nicely for a husband as well.
Memories of my schoolgirl fancys for husband names have amused me over the years. Amused me because I worked in advertising. Advertising is one of the bastions perpetual coolness. I am a very uncool person, and always have been as the decisions to be a housewife and not use birth control in our day and age would clearly indicate to anyone with half a brain. However, over the years I have been quietly amused to watch very cool ad people give their cats the very same names I once thought most desirable for husbands.
Recently, I stumbled across another name that is a marvelous name for a husband but most cool people would think only to give it to their cat instead. Which would be a shame because this fellow is infinitely more amusing than any cat high on cosmic catnip could ever be. But this fellow is as elusive as a cat which makes him very mysterious.
I like mysterious. I like Boethius, or as he is more properly addressed, Herr Professor Doktor Boethius P. von Korncrake. Not only has Boethius beeen a reader of Patum Peperium of, as he wrote, many, many weeks, he is, more importantly, a very good friend of The Manolo. Boethius is also not only the author of 15 books no longer in print but the author of the introduction to The Manolo's latest book, The Consolation of the Shoes:
How does one explain Manolo the Shoeblogger to someone who's never visited his wildly popular internet site? Well, take two parts high-class shoe fetishist, one part Ricky Ricardo, and one part Jacques Barzun, a dash of Ignatius J. Reilly, shake vigorously and decant liberally, and you've got Manolo the Shoeblogger.
Since first appearing in October, 2004, his website, Manolo's Shoe Blog, has become one of the best read fashion sites on the internet, and the Manolo himself has been praised by authorities as various as the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Fortune, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and the master shoe designer himself, Manolo Blahnik, for his eccentric, erudite, and at times outrageous sense of humor, and for his extensive knowledge of shoes and fashion.
Now, in The Consolation of the Shoes, the Manolo reveals yet another side of himself, recounting a late night visitation from a mysterious woman, a visitation that sends the young Manolo on a quest to find the perfect pair of shoes. Along the way he wrestles with a series of footwear-based teleological and eschatological problems culminating in a transcendent moment of pure shoe joy. Throughout the Manolo remains his usual unusual self, full of cockeyed aphorisms, oddball observations, and trenchant social and cultural commentary, all of it both hilarious and very intelligent.
Find out what the readers of Manolo's Shoe Blog have long known, that fashion and philosophy are not incompatible, and that Manolo the Shoeblogger is one of the funniest and smartest people you'll read this year.
Herr Doktor, or Boethius as he shall be always called here at Patum Peperium, is a wonderfully gifted writer. His account of first meeting The Manolo is most delighful:
When my good friend Manolo the Shoeblogger asked me to write the introduction to his delightful new work, The Consolation of the Shoes, I was surprised.
“But my dear Manolo,” I protested, “You have so many friends who are so much more famous than I.”
“Yes, Herr Professor, but none know the Manolo as you know the Manolo.”
How could I argue with this?
I have been one of Manolo the Shoeblogger’s closest friends ever since I first met him on New Year’s Eve of 1989, when I literally stumbled across him at the end of David Hasselhoff’s life-altering concert from atop the Berlin Wall.
How well I remember that day! The Wall had just come down and I had crossed over into West Berlin earlier in the day to do what Ossis did in those heady days: shop for bananas, visit relatives, and see the incredible Herr Hasselhoff in concert.
It was as I was leaving the concert, still a-quiver with emotion, that I first encountered the Manolo.
He was standing absolutely still, letting this mighty crowd flow around him like a rock in the river. He is not a tall man, and my eyes were still filled with tears from the emotions I was experiencing, and so I did not see him until I stumbled over him and fell to the ground.
As he reached down to help me, I was astonished, for he looked exactly like some sort of Spanish grandee: an impeccably tailored dark suit, a carefully knotted foulard, a short cape, and his one concession to his surroundings, a tyrolean hat!
“Remarkable!”
“Please, allow the Manolo to help you to your feet, dear man.” He said in in that charmingly accented voice of his, his German as facile as his English.
“Danke. I perceive by your dress and speech that you are not German.”
“No, the Manolo is only here to see Señor Hasselhoff in concert. Was it not sublime?”
I knew in that instant that here was a kindred soul, and thus a friendship was born.
Soon the Manolo and I were touring Europe in my Trabant 500, following Herr Hasselhoff from concert to concert. We were “Hassel-Heads” in the parlance of the day, those who had given themselves over, body and soul, to the sweet, sweet music produced by that master entertainer.
Well, here we are nearly two decades later, and the Manolo has asked me to write the introduction to his new work, and what could I say but, “yes, gladly my friend,” eventhough I had not read a single word of what he had written.
Soon the manuscript of The Consolation of the Shoes arrived, and from the first page I knew that my faith in my friend’s ability to entertain and enlighten had not been misplaced.
The Consolation of the Shoes is a work in the grand tradition of my namesake, Boethius. (As always I must now stop and express my thanks to my late parents who gave me this blessed and appropriate name.)
Naturally, I take some small credit for the Manolo’s choice of subject, for it was I, who upon first hearing of his late night visit from Lady Fashion, had suggested that he read The Consolation of Philosophy as a way of interpreting what had happened to him so many years earlier.
And now he has repaid me that suggestion by producing one of the most startling and original works of philosophy I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Please, go purchase The Consolation of the Shoes now, you will not be disappointed.
(I too must stop and express my thanks to Boethius's late parents who gave him this blessed and appropriate name. Danke schön late parents of Boethius.) You will find Boethius comfortably settled into our links under Korncrake. And, like he wrote of his good friend The Manolo, you will find Boethius to be most entertaining and enlightening. I'm just so glad to find he does not have four paws, a tail and whiskers. Well, cat whiskers that is.
Welcome Boethius. My, how I love saying that name...
Mrs. P
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