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.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
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?
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
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 15, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
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