The bleacher dialogue: étoiles, doom, two selves, and the Founder's types of sight

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, across the remainder of the Hal-Stice exhibition.
• What: With deLint back on Steeply's other side supplying stats-talk, Poutrincourt delivers the book's fullest theory of the Academy — mostly in Québecois, sliding briefly into English for verdicts like "'Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,' Poutrincourt said in English." Child stars are nothing new, she says (Lenglen to Kleckner), but the ones who become étoiles "must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed" — a doom she generalizes: "One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years." Schtitt's real project, she explains, is a third way — "M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to walk between these," "To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success" — because the usual result is fatal: "'It is contradictory. Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died…'" She invokes the dead Founder directly: "'This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of sight.'" — whose study was "not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees." Her distillation arrives almost privately: "'So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,' Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself" — one beat before the oblivious deLint points at the exemplar ("But the one we see this most in is Hal."). A subsequent untagged paragraph ("Schtitt and I think it's a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here.") is ruled deLint's, not hers (see Dating notes) — her contribution stays the étoile theory, his the temperament ledger. Her diction, meanwhile, does quiet work on the listening spy: "Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook réflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy."