9/2/12: 98%
Mood: Gritty
Drink: La Croix
The fact that I am almost done with this sucker, and am therefore draining the dregs of two solid months of literary toil, is making me maudlin. I'm desperate to end it. Yet, as with so many terrible relationships, it's difficult, at the very last, not to hesitate. The end of Don Q means the end of summer. It means the days drawing down, the cold coming, death creeping closer and closer still.
Maudlin, like I said.
I find myself, in a Stockholm Syndrome-esque fit, missing the old coot. I miss him in the piercing way you feel an absence that hasn't yet managed to manifest itself -a keener missing, and a truer, than you can ever conjure once a person is gone.
O, Don Q! Your speeches; your long underwear; your saturninity! How will I go on, deprived of your windmill-tilting, your futile charging, your umbrage-taking, your ill-advised quests, your slaughter of straw men, your multiplicity of unhorsings, your hasty restreats, your glorious immolation of the body of practicality upon the bright, hot pyre of gallantry?
You didn't look good doing it. But then, how many of us do?
Showing posts with label Quixotification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quixotification. Show all posts
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Dallying with the Don
8/26/2012: 82% and lollygagging
Mood: Equable
Drink: Tap water
One -yes, at last, one!- interesting thing about Don Quixote: Cervantes has begun to evidence a fillip of self-awareness. He's set up his book as a history of a history, a scholarly work several steps removed from the events in play. This allows him to do some narrative layering -sometimes with spot-on results.
I read this passage and thought, YES, OH GOD YES.
"It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it- that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery..."
Mood: Equable
Drink: Tap water
One -yes, at last, one!- interesting thing about Don Quixote: Cervantes has begun to evidence a fillip of self-awareness. He's set up his book as a history of a history, a scholarly work several steps removed from the events in play. This allows him to do some narrative layering -sometimes with spot-on results.
I read this passage and thought, YES, OH GOD YES.
"It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it- that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery..."
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Only Peripherally About Don Q
08/22/12: 81%
Mood: Fetid
Drink: Sparkly Garbage
I have this to say about Don Quixote: Shhh.
It's the dog days, and I seem to have embarked, pun oh-so-shamelessly intened, on the worst kind of wallow. I got back from vacation on Saturday. I did quite a bit of work on Sunday, not much work on Monday, a pittance on Tuesday, and absolutely nothing today in a slow deceleration that reminds me, alarmingly, of that film montage in Up in which a couple of lovebirds go from bounding up the hill to picnic to staggering up the hill to die.
I'm not dying, but I'm sure as heck not doing much of anything else, either.
I'm supposed to be working right now: three days of slog at a job that relieves me, during the normal course of events, of the time and energy necessary for penning the next great American novel or manuscripts on spec or invitations to fabulous parties or my signature on credit card receipts for stuff like actual chairs.
Instead, I don't know if I'll have that particular job (my company's contract with the system is out for bid) or if I'll be scrambling to find something else. I can't even scramble just yet- still waiting on a solid answer either way. I'm finally in possession of the the time to relax, to loll expansively toward ALL THOSE THINGS I'VE BEEN MEANING TO GET TO, only I'm not getting to any of them. Even leisure has palled: I should socialize, get out of the house, but....meh.
Cue self-loathing. And more wallowing.
It's worth knowing that you require, in the ointment of your leisure hours, the fly of work. It's also kind of gross.
Mood: Fetid
Drink: Sparkly Garbage
I have this to say about Don Quixote: Shhh.
It's the dog days, and I seem to have embarked, pun oh-so-shamelessly intened, on the worst kind of wallow. I got back from vacation on Saturday. I did quite a bit of work on Sunday, not much work on Monday, a pittance on Tuesday, and absolutely nothing today in a slow deceleration that reminds me, alarmingly, of that film montage in Up in which a couple of lovebirds go from bounding up the hill to picnic to staggering up the hill to die.
I'm not dying, but I'm sure as heck not doing much of anything else, either.
I'm supposed to be working right now: three days of slog at a job that relieves me, during the normal course of events, of the time and energy necessary for penning the next great American novel or manuscripts on spec or invitations to fabulous parties or my signature on credit card receipts for stuff like actual chairs.
Instead, I don't know if I'll have that particular job (my company's contract with the system is out for bid) or if I'll be scrambling to find something else. I can't even scramble just yet- still waiting on a solid answer either way. I'm finally in possession of the the time to relax, to loll expansively toward ALL THOSE THINGS I'VE BEEN MEANING TO GET TO, only I'm not getting to any of them. Even leisure has palled: I should socialize, get out of the house, but....meh.
Cue self-loathing. And more wallowing.
It's worth knowing that you require, in the ointment of your leisure hours, the fly of work. It's also kind of gross.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Instead of Don Q
08/16/12: 72%
Mood: Dark
Drink: Tea
Books I have gobbled since July 3 while pretending to read Don Quixote: 6
The Long Goodbye, Anne Tyler
Crappy Romance Novels #1, #2 (names have been changed to protect the innocent. By which I mean my ego)
Broken Harbor, Tana French
Dare Me, Megan Abbot
Desert Solitaire, Eward Abbey
Sigh.
Mood: Dark
Drink: Tea
Books I have gobbled since July 3 while pretending to read Don Quixote: 6
The Long Goodbye, Anne Tyler
Crappy Romance Novels #1, #2 (names have been changed to protect the innocent. By which I mean my ego)
Broken Harbor, Tana French
Dare Me, Megan Abbot
Desert Solitaire, Eward Abbey
Sigh.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Don Quixsnorte.
"You take a long time to tell it, Senor Don Quixote."
-The Curate
Truer words never spoken! (August 8, 2012). At 58% and slogging forward, the experience of reading Don Quixote has distilled itself into a titanic battle against literary intertia. I want to stop; everything within me cries out to stop; I cannot stop.
Neither can Don Quixote, who will be in the middle of speechifying -actually, truth be told, he'll be long past what you thought must necessarily comprise the middle of his discourse, because if it weren't the middle, but were more toward the front end of things, the dude would still be standing there speechifying as the skyscrapers tumble and the clouds mushroom and the nukes are deployed- he'll be in the middle of speechifying, closing in, only to duck around a rhetorical corner and emerge, like a first-class featherweight, primed for more.
It's rather impressive, truth be told. Watching someone extend themselves beyond the outer reaches of your imagination is galvanizing. Think of the Olympics, of the Curiosity Rover, of yourself at the end of a couch-to-5K program. It is satisfying to have your limits belied
It's also monumentally soporific. They should sell this thing to insomniacs.
-The Curate
Truer words never spoken! (August 8, 2012). At 58% and slogging forward, the experience of reading Don Quixote has distilled itself into a titanic battle against literary intertia. I want to stop; everything within me cries out to stop; I cannot stop.
Neither can Don Quixote, who will be in the middle of speechifying -actually, truth be told, he'll be long past what you thought must necessarily comprise the middle of his discourse, because if it weren't the middle, but were more toward the front end of things, the dude would still be standing there speechifying as the skyscrapers tumble and the clouds mushroom and the nukes are deployed- he'll be in the middle of speechifying, closing in, only to duck around a rhetorical corner and emerge, like a first-class featherweight, primed for more.
It's rather impressive, truth be told. Watching someone extend themselves beyond the outer reaches of your imagination is galvanizing. Think of the Olympics, of the Curiosity Rover, of yourself at the end of a couch-to-5K program. It is satisfying to have your limits belied
It's also monumentally soporific. They should sell this thing to insomniacs.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Sex, Don Q, and Rock n' Roll
Tuesday, July 31, 2012:
There's story, and then there's the story of story.
Which is a totally #vaguebooking way to say there's the book you're reading (just for the sake of argument let's call it DON QUIXOTE), and then there's narrative of your reading journey.
Yes, I totally just said "your reading journey" with a straight face. This is what comes of dabbling in Literature.
My reading journey usually plays out something like this: wanttoreadwantoreadwantoYESGETTOREADREADREADREADOHYESMOREREADINGMOREMUSTFINISHohcrapI'mdone.
A pretty standard narrative shape, right? Complete with set up, ramp up, climax, and come down. An indubitably human narrative, the shape of sex, of hunger, of rock n' roll.
Except Don Quixote is different. Today, July 31st, 2012, is the deadline before which each member of my book club agreed to be done with half of the 1,000 pages that are our purgatory. We worried about this deadline, when we set it. We reasoned, drawing on our previous experience with stuff like other books and potato chips, that we'd have trouble preventing ourselves from wanting more.
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
I reached the halfway mark on Saturday. Between Saturday and today I have finished two -yes two!- complete novels, neither of which bore the slightest resemblance to more of Don Quixote.
Book club meets tonight. To utterly degrade Susan Cooper, Tonight I get wine, but tomorrow will be beyond imagining.
The shape is wrong, see. We've left the bedroom and are sojourning in the narrative equivalent of a bathtub. There are gentle ripples of story, episode after self-contained episode, even episodes nesting within episodes, but nothing strong enough to rock the rubber ducky of our souls.
That's right. I said that, too. Blame Literature. I sure do.
There's story, and then there's the story of story.
Which is a totally #vaguebooking way to say there's the book you're reading (just for the sake of argument let's call it DON QUIXOTE), and then there's narrative of your reading journey.
Yes, I totally just said "your reading journey" with a straight face. This is what comes of dabbling in Literature.
My reading journey usually plays out something like this: wanttoreadwantoreadwantoYESGETTOREADREADREADREADOHYESMOREREADINGMOREMUSTFINISHohcrapI'mdone.
A pretty standard narrative shape, right? Complete with set up, ramp up, climax, and come down. An indubitably human narrative, the shape of sex, of hunger, of rock n' roll.
Except Don Quixote is different. Today, July 31st, 2012, is the deadline before which each member of my book club agreed to be done with half of the 1,000 pages that are our purgatory. We worried about this deadline, when we set it. We reasoned, drawing on our previous experience with stuff like other books and potato chips, that we'd have trouble preventing ourselves from wanting more.
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
I reached the halfway mark on Saturday. Between Saturday and today I have finished two -yes two!- complete novels, neither of which bore the slightest resemblance to more of Don Quixote.
Book club meets tonight. To utterly degrade Susan Cooper, Tonight I get wine, but tomorrow will be beyond imagining.
The shape is wrong, see. We've left the bedroom and are sojourning in the narrative equivalent of a bathtub. There are gentle ripples of story, episode after self-contained episode, even episodes nesting within episodes, but nothing strong enough to rock the rubber ducky of our souls.
That's right. I said that, too. Blame Literature. I sure do.
Friday, July 27, 2012
At Home with Don Q
Friday, July 27th:
You'd think that reading a peripatetic novel on the road would be doubly satisfying, kind of like slamming scones while scarfing Austen.
You'd think wrong.
It's true that there was a whole lot of traveling going on. Don Q was gallumphing more or less gracefully down the high road. I was schlepping through two countries and six states. He covered less ground (horse, ass, feet) than I did (plane, train, automobile), but he impaled things a whole lot more. (Don Q's solution to life, the universe, and everything: Lance it!)
I got back yesterday at 2:00 AM EDT.
He, God help him -God help ME- still going.
It's the aimlessness that bugged me. I mean, I had stuff to do! Don Q had stuff to do, too, but it was so amorphous (embody knight errantry! Gallantly!) it might as well have been nothing. And so, even though Don Q and I were both making up our beds anew night after night, and thus ostensibly had something in common, I started to resent him.
Why did he get to run around speechifying when I had to figure out how to make my Power Point go "whoosh?" Why did he get to maunder shirtless over the mesas while I drank a lot of very, very bad coffee?
We'll see if he and I get along better now that I'm at home for the luxurious span of a week.
Other notes:
*Lothario! The word! Comes from Don Quixote! I mean, hot damn! Almost (not quite) worth the schlep!
*Are we there yet?
You'd think that reading a peripatetic novel on the road would be doubly satisfying, kind of like slamming scones while scarfing Austen.
You'd think wrong.
It's true that there was a whole lot of traveling going on. Don Q was gallumphing more or less gracefully down the high road. I was schlepping through two countries and six states. He covered less ground (horse, ass, feet) than I did (plane, train, automobile), but he impaled things a whole lot more. (Don Q's solution to life, the universe, and everything: Lance it!)
I got back yesterday at 2:00 AM EDT.
He, God help him -God help ME- still going.
It's the aimlessness that bugged me. I mean, I had stuff to do! Don Q had stuff to do, too, but it was so amorphous (embody knight errantry! Gallantly!) it might as well have been nothing. And so, even though Don Q and I were both making up our beds anew night after night, and thus ostensibly had something in common, I started to resent him.
Why did he get to run around speechifying when I had to figure out how to make my Power Point go "whoosh?" Why did he get to maunder shirtless over the mesas while I drank a lot of very, very bad coffee?
We'll see if he and I get along better now that I'm at home for the luxurious span of a week.
Other notes:
*Lothario! The word! Comes from Don Quixote! I mean, hot damn! Almost (not quite) worth the schlep!
*Are we there yet?
Monday, July 16, 2012
On the Road with Don Q
Monday, July 16th:
It was at about 14% (who needs pages when you've sold your soul to Amazon) that I began wishing my longstanding conflation of Don Quixote with Dos Equis took a more tangible form.
I feel, quite strongly, that this is the sort of of novel that improves with beer. Partly because it reels, like a drunk, from episode to episode, but not insubstantially because the process of forcing comedy through the long, tight tunnel of four centuries demands lubrication.
Comedy doesn't travel well. You grasp this when you watch episodes of The Daily Show from 2009, but you really understand this, bone deep, as you read satirical passages in Don Q. Poking fun at literature so old your grandmother couldn't have used it for toilet paper? Not so hilarious.
Other thoughts:
It was at about 14% (who needs pages when you've sold your soul to Amazon) that I began wishing my longstanding conflation of Don Quixote with Dos Equis took a more tangible form.
I feel, quite strongly, that this is the sort of of novel that improves with beer. Partly because it reels, like a drunk, from episode to episode, but not insubstantially because the process of forcing comedy through the long, tight tunnel of four centuries demands lubrication.
Comedy doesn't travel well. You grasp this when you watch episodes of The Daily Show from 2009, but you really understand this, bone deep, as you read satirical passages in Don Q. Poking fun at literature so old your grandmother couldn't have used it for toilet paper? Not so hilarious.
Other thoughts:
- Satire sours over time, but some basic comedy is indelible. Like poop. Still about as funny or not funny as it always was, depending on how hilarious you find poop.
- Chapter names that announce exactly what will happen next are counterintuitively entertaining. Why do we demand surprise all the time? What's wrong with watching stuff unfold?
- Is there going to be any character development here, or is the point merely to move characters though space and time, like comedic chess men? Because that's kinda boring. And there's a whole, whole lotta Don Quixote left to go...
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Tilting
"Tough choice! I think maybe The Forsythe Saga, though I have to say that Proust is also very tempting. Really anything but Don Quixote- just not sure I can hack that."
Cue the universe's maniacal laughter.
July's a busy month for me: I'm making my first ever recording in the my-name-is-on-the-CD-and-not-buried-in-the-back-of-the-booklet sense, and I'm running scared. The perfect time, it would seem, to have at those mills of wind.
But if I have to suffer, y'all do, too. You know you've just been waiting for a DON QUIXOTE LIVEBLOG! Oh yes.
In addition, I hereby issue an open invitation to y'all to hop onboard and read along. Please? Where are you going?
Le sigh.
Thus far I've downloaded a free version of the book to my Kindle, tangled with the translator's preface, and skipped Cervantes's rambling prologue. Now I'm on page 3. Page 3, people! Bow down!
Though I have to say this sounds eerily familiar:
"In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits."
Quixotically Yours,
Anne
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