Word: domecq
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CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ...
Since Bustos Domecq does not exist, Argentine Authors Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares had to invent him. Why? Because Domecq is the pure incarnation of the middleman between a world gone culturally haywire and the uncomprehending mass of mankind. His function: telling people why they should admire nonsense. This inept critic is a figure of Chaplinesque pathos: a tastemaker totally lacking in taste, a perpetual target of the avant-garde's custard pies...
Easy Vanity. As this collection of mock essays about mock artists amply demonstrates, no aesthetic theory is too lunatic for Domecq to explain and applaud. He takes up the cudgels for the late César Paladión, an imaginary novelist who followed the path of rigorous logic straight into absurdity. Since all writers, Paladión reasoned, borrow words and sometimes even phrases and lines from other writers, why not take this process as far as it can go? "Reaching into the depths of his soul," Domecq prattles, "he published a series of books that expressed him utterly...
...critic is equally hysterical about another large-scale plagiarism: the Divine Comedy of Hilario Lambkin Formento. This nonbook is not a brazen, word-for-word theft, Domecq insists, but rather the best piece of descriptive criticism ever penned on Dante's masterpiece, since it is an exact replica of the original...
...from the Victorian scene. In private life, though, this intense esthetic susceptibility proved an acute embarrassment. It embroiled him in a number of skittish skirmishes with women, all pretty and all too young. Like a "just-fledged owlet," as he put it, he began by pining helplessly for Adele Domecq, the dazzling but unobtainable daughter of his father's business partner (Father was a sherry merchant). Much later in life, when he was past 50, he fell tragically in love with a nine-year-old girl named Rose La Touche...