Word: hosteller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...times at the hostel: a young journalist (Claudio Cassinelli) is pressed by an eager priest to collaborate on memoirs that will try to explain away his wartime cooperation with the Nazis. The priest has lodgings at a religious hostel virtually at the Vatican's threshold and books a room for the journalist just down the corridor. As is usually the way with such fictive establishments, the place is a hotbed of perversion, frustration and bad manners. Presiding over these various follies is an iron maiden passing as a nun (Glenda Jackson), who gets her jollies by encouraging everyone else...
...another anticlerical tract, with healthy doses of lubricity included to get the unconverted over the rough parts. Assignations are revealed, suicides initiated and plots thickened. One resident spills out a tale of hot romance with his sister. His parents did not approve and shipped him off to the hostel for safekeeping. Jackson finds religious relief- and, one supposes, some measure of sexual satisfaction - by strapping a belt of thorns around her waist very tightly. The collaborationist priest craves extra desserts at mealtimes...
While Catholicism takes it squarely on the chin a number of times, Damiani's point is that there is just no getting away from Mother Church. As it turns out, he means it quite literally. The journalist escapes from the Jackson regime, and other residents of the hostel defect as well. But none can live without the church's comforting repression. All find their way back there quite soon, except the journalist, the eternal skeptic, who just has a good laugh about the whole thing. The Devil Is a Woman, however, makes a pretty flat cosmic joke...
...made my way to San Francisco, checked into the Youth Hostel and went looking for work. I had read my Kerouac. I know what one did in California, and I was determined to get a piece of the West Coast action. I was on my own, meeting people on Telegraph Avenue and going to wild Berkeley bashes and digging the time away, but despite my dreams and my intentions, I soon realized that I was all partied out. This was not Cambridge, this wasn't my home turf, and my doubts were reinforced nightly when I made collect phone calls...
...been taught by priests and served them at Mass and I knew for sure we would have one maybe even two, comfortable rooms Bill was smarter than I thought. The priest just kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." He gave us a tip about a youth hostel outside of Reno and we walked about two miles to get there. But it was locked and it looked unapproachable in the middle of flat land, a big Victorian house...