As you might guess, Chaucer had zero tolerance for the idea that, to take one example, “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” is an artist.  “Artist?  The guitarist Prince you mean?  I suppose you could call him an entertainer or, if feeling generous a musician.  But why do mediocre minds want to inflate the meaning of “artist”?  Michael Jackson?  An artist?  Michael was a ghastly paedophile.  When not having night overs with children or riding with them in choo-choo trains, he’d write songs and sing?  Consider Bob Dylan as an “artist.”  He wrote folk songs and managed to sing them in a hillbilly voice that was foreign to the speech of northern Minnesota where he grew up.  If you want to know what an artist is, read Vasari’s Lives, you’ll know soon enough what an artist.  Artists’ paint, draw, sculpt, and design great buildings.  Look at Brunelleschi’s Dome or Giotto’s murals, or Duccio’s triptych.  You’ll see and hear even with your ignorant eyes and ears what a pack of dwarves pop musicians and their lot are.  In the poet Elliot’s Prufrock poem, the women don’t scurry about talking of Caruso, they carry on about Michelangelo.  You can bet Beethoven never called himself an artist.  He was a composer, a gifted pianist, and a genius.”

When he got going like this, Chaucey would stop from time to time to purr about his own thoughts.  Chaucey showed the influence of mike on his mental formation.  He grew up listening to Coltrane and classical Music.  Whilst listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Bach, Chaucey enjoyed looking at glossies of paintings by Old Masters in Janson’s History of Art and came to share mike’s taste for Poussin, Raphael, or other painters of high repute, though he puked when he saw Bacon’s portrait of Kate Moss.  Chaucey would have been right at home at Windsor Castle or any gathering of rich Etonians. 

Chaucer could not bear to bring up art without linking it to money.  “Look” he would say, “at where real art is. I’ll tell you where it is.  It’s in Louvre, the Prado the National Gallery, the Tate, the Musee de Rodin.  And you know what, if it’s real art, the likes of you could never afford it.  It is not made for the consumption of guys in bowling shirts or women in muumuus.  One must attain a level of culture to know what art is. “ 

Chaucer was not shy in asserting his superiority over everybody. He claimed he was a member of the Azevedo-Grower family, an ancient Portuguese family that, during a period of impecunity had been reduced to marrying an Englishman.  As time passed, access to royals made the English half of the name tolerable.   When asked when he was not living with royals, he claimed Roberta had kidnaped him.  A bad case of Stockholm syndrome hit him.  He came to love — one of his wilder claims, as if he knew what love was—Roberta and mike so much he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them, especially since mike showed the rudiments of decent taste.  For example, mike knew what a real artist was.

Now that you know what a grinding snob Chaucer was, you may excuse me for praying every night that that night would be his last.  He did say one thing that worried me.  “Don’t imagine that my death will rid you of me. I will haunt you.  You will never escape.”  Bart was wise enough to be spared all this.  After the bite, she stayed far enough away from Mr C never to hear his soliloquies.