Chekhov’s Mistess

A Quixotic Homage?

 

I’ve been impressed with Jason’s Palm-pilot reading of DQ, so I thought everyone might find this news item interesting…

Physicists in Madrid, Spain are celebrating the 400th anniversary of publication of “Don Quixote” in a very small way: they wrote the first paragraph on a silicon chip in letters so tiny the whole 1,000-page book would fit on the tips of six human hairs…Using water vapor in the atmosphere and an electric charge, that tip basically etches out tiny letters on the surface.

From the San Jose Mercury News (registration required: bugmenot pw )

p.s. I know the Grossman translation is bulky, but I’m enjoying having a larger typeface than in my old Jarvis translation that is just a stubby little paperback. Of course, I am now on the verge of using reading glasses, so that may explain my preference.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 06-Apr-2005
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• related:
• “A Sane Man Gone Mad and a Madman Edging Toward Sanity”
• |
• “Fortunate the age and fortunate the times”
• |
• Brian Phillips Essay on Don Quixote
• |
• Don Quixote and Monty Python
• |
• Don Quixote at 400: Open Source Radio

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Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote

 

I picked up a copy of the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote earlier today, and haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet. I’ve read several translations of Don Quixote before, but that was years ago, and my memory is fuzzy, so I’m looking forward to reading it again (and having a pile of translations on hand for easy comparison).

In the meantime, I’d like to reacquaint you with Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wrote a short story called Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. (The link will take you to the full text of the story, as translated by Anthony Bonner.)

In the story, Menard set out to write Don Quixote again, from scratch – not to write another Quixote, but to write the same Don Quixote. Not to copy the Quixote, but to actually compose it again, the same book by a different author and in a different historical and cultural context.

At first, Menard thought to recreate the experiences of Cervantes in order to undertake his project. But in the end, “to be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him to be less arduous – and consequently less interesting – than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.”

Bud Parr wrote an interesting post about how the thread of conversation throughout literature played a part in his decision to read the Quixote. Several readers here have shown an interest in discussing the historical context in which Cervantes wrote, which strikes me as fascinating. From this we can try to understand what Cervantes intended in writing Don Quixote, and how the book would have been interpreted by readers around the time it was written.

Still, what an author writes is not always what he meant to convey. And sometimes, what an author turns out to have written and the applications and connections it can bear are at least as interesting as what he intended. As it turned out, Borges’s narrator in Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote informed us that “the text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” Accordingly, I intend to read Don Quixote out of context.

I’m not precisely sure what I mean by that, nor do I promise to stick with it come what may, but we’ll see how this goes.

Now! I shall distract you by pointing you towards the Quixotic Windmill Project that will be taking place at Burning Man this August. Their plan is to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote by building three 20’ tall windmills out in the desert, and then charging at them with fiery lances and burning them to the ground. I can’t attend, since I’ll just have taken the NY bar exam and should probably start being a lawyer at around that time, but I’m looking forward to seeing the photos.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 05-Apr-2005
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On the Death of Postmodernism and Book Reviewing

 

If you feel like crying over the death of postmodernism, read this at Rake’s Progress. You will cry, laughing.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 04-Apr-2005
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Dan’s the Man

 

Dan Wicket, the tireless editor of the Emerging Writer’s Network just sent out his latest Lit-bloggers E-Panel, where we find that MadInkBeard is an anagram of Derik Badman’s name. It seems so obvious now. Was I the last to know?

Besides myself, there are some familiar names and some newer sites on the panel. Here’s the list:

Collected Miscellany

David Thayer

Kevin Holtsberry

Babies Are Fireproof

Pete Coco

Sarah Rogers

Lila Byock

BookNinja

George Murray

The Happy Booker

Wendi Kaufman

Cusp of Something

Jai Clare

The Mumpsimus

Matthew Cheney

MadInkBeard

Derik A. Badman

It was fun being a part and seeing what the others had to say too. This is the third round of interviews Dan has conducted on Lit-bloggers and he does a lot of other great things, so make sure to see the rest of Dan’s site too.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 04-Apr-2005
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Why Read Don Quixote?

 

Once while having lunch with a friend, we hit upon the inevitable subject of what each of us was reading. He said he was slogging through some long classic, but was determined to finish. When I asked why he would spend his time on something so taxing, he commented that it’s an important book and he felt like he needed to have read it. I imagine that his is a common affliction, wanting to have read something for no other reason than it’s supposed to be important. Do that a few too many times and you’re sure to take the enjoyment out of reading.

Now, I have to confess that I’ve read Don Quixote before, but I put it down nearly half-way through. I was having a difficult time understanding why it was the great novel that it is so often hailed. Now I’m back to it, and not only that, but here I am pulling together a diverse bunch of writers to write about the book as we go along – I’m jumping off the deep end, as they say, on a book that I couldn’t get through the first time around. Why?

Dunno, really, but everyone has some gravitational force pulling them from one book to the next and mine happens to be fairly consistent. I have a distinct curiosity about what inspires and influences a writer. There is this thread of a conversation throughout great literature that fascinates me. Sometimes that conversation takes the form of a direct reference: Father Mapple in Moby Dick retelling the biblical tale of Jonah, or Dante guided by Virgil, the author of The Aeneid, through Hell and Purgatory. Sometimes it’s an acknowledgment, like Faulkner naming his masterpiece from a line in a Shakespeare play (“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth Act V, Scene V). And other times it’s more subtle, a recognition that Nabokov and T.S. Eliot owe some of their linguistic playfulness to Lewis Carroll, for instance.

These things tend to lead me down a road that I find just as compelling as Dante’s path to Paradise. Here’s an example: Reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, I learned that he was influenced by T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly The Waste Land, which I promptly went back and re-read (Calvino says to read a classic is always to re-read it). What did I find there (reading the annotations), but Eliot’s debt to The Quest for the Holy Grail. Reading one of the original conceptions of the Quest I found that, sure enough, the relationship between all these books was right there in a text written somewhere around 1215, itself derived from Celtic folk tales and the Bible. Even the phrase “the waste land” is used many times throughout and I could feel, and feel is about the best I could do, how Eliot might have interpreted this Christian tale and some of its pagan interpretations. Of course the Quest takes place in King Arthur’s court and those knights errant are the very chivalric searchers that our gallant hero, Don Quixote read about.

If you’re going to rely on anyone to tell you who to read, let it be Melville, Faulkner, Eliot or Nabokov. Now I’m not suggesting that I would waste hours of my time to read Don Quixote or any other book because Nabokov said so (incidentally, I’ve read that he was not a fan of the Quixote at first). No, I’m saying that I came to read Don Quixote out of a seemingly inevitable collision with the book through others I’ve read. It is a part of the conversation.

Another example is James Joyce’s confounding, incredible, but fun once-you-get-to-know-it, novel, Ulysses. To read Ulysses is to read an interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (among others less significant). Reading those enhance the experience of Joyce’s book, and reading Ulysses one gets an appreciation for the way Joyce opened the door (if not necessarily a direct influence) for Faulkner’s work, Beckett’s, Gaddis’s and many others. In the same way, Cervantes, so we’ve read, opened the door for writers after him to move past the romantic, flat characters and events that characterized the literature before him.

King Lear and Macbeth were published the same year as Don Quixote. It’s interesting to think, like two scientists discovering the genetic map at the same time, that Shakespeare was writing contemporaneously with Cervantes, on different continents, both creating these oh so human and subtly complex and iconic characters of literature. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza give the novel its life (that much I do know from my previous encounter) and now that I feel as though it has been handed down to me through the hands of masters, I have to ask, how could I not read Don Quixote?

• posted by Bud Parr
• 01-Apr-2005
• 4 comments »
• share this »

• related:
• “A Sane Man Gone Mad and a Madman Edging Toward Sanity”
• |
• “Fortunate the age and fortunate the times”
• |
• A Quixotic Homage?
• |
• Brian Phillips Essay on Don Quixote
• |
• Don Quixote and Monty Python

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If It’s April, It Must Be That One Month of The Year to Think About Poetry

 

Librarians, start your posters, it’s National Poetry Month! Here are a couple of NYC events of note:

The Academy of American Poets: Poetry & The Creative Mind

Tuesday, April 5, 2005, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City.

Poetry & The Creative Mind, now in its third year, is the annual benefit for the Academy of American Poets. Leading artists, musicians, actors, scholars, athletes, and public figures read favorite poems by some of America’s best-loved poets. This year’s special guest readers include: Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, Tony Kushner, Maya Lin, Sam Waterston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Minnie Driver, Dan Rather, Frank Rich, Gore Vidal, and Diane von Furstenberg. This star-studded evening has become one of the most anticipated literary events of the year and is not to be missed by anyone who loves poetry.

TICKET INFORMATION: Tickets are $35, $50, and $75. Full-price tickets can be ordered online, by phone (212-721-6500), or at the Alice Tully Hall Box Office (Broadway and 65th Street). Academy members receive a $10 discount (phone orders only). Students receive a $5 (box office orders only).

A limited number of VIP tickets are available. VIP tickets, which include the performance followed by a cocktail buffet supper with the special guest readers, begin at $400. For information about VIP tickets, contact Beth Harrison at (212) 274-0343 ext. 34.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 01-Apr-2005
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The Unspoken We of Czeslaw Milosz

 

In this week’s The New Republic Adam Zegajewski writes glowingly about Czeslaw Milosz’s final book, Second Space. One thing I enjoyed about the article was how he evoked the places the poet inhabited:

Milosz reigned in the medieval city of Kraków like Goethe in Weimar, greeted in the streets by friends and strangers, visited by young and old poets, giving interviews to local and foreign journalists, and writing (or dictating) until the very end.

“Place” is not always a city, but the state of mind that comes with either being there or not being someplace else. I was shocked to think of Milosz as ever being lonely, but as Zegajewski poignantly describes:

During the many years when he lived and worked in California, he was convinced that nobody read his poetry. His loneliness was almost perfect. When he turned sixty, he later told a friend, he did not receive a single card with birthday wishes. There is an anecdote about his meeting Adam Michnik, a young but already famous dissident, in a café in Paris in the 1970s: when Michnik started to recite from memory one after another of Milosz’s poems (he can still do it), the poet burst into tears.

“Place” lives in poetry too:

His poetry speaks a very individual language; it is unmistakably Miloszian, it has a distinct biography and a distinct geography, it has the taste of his childhood in the black forests of Lithuania and of his many years in sun-burnt California, near the San Francisco Bay—and yet it also has an amazing quality of expressing the universal battle between the different metaphysics that characterized the age in which he lived.

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth described a poet as a someone “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” That seems a particularly apt description for Milosz as he was able to write, as Zegajewski says, polyphonically…

Milosz has many voices indeed; he speaks through contradictions, hesitations, moods. He is a searcher, not a claimer; or maybe somebody who claims and searches at the same time. But he is not a fragmented or divided or schizophrenic poet: the various voices speaking through him are elements of an extremely complex modern personality, but they are not a sign of the poet’s helplessness, of his failure to attain an essential integrity. Their plurality is a sign of life…

That “polyphony”, as Donald Davie says in Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, is the way the “poet finds to speak of experience on which he has no stable purchase, how he multiplies voices and perspectives to tell the complex truth,” where “I,” either actual or as a persona, is, in the face of “complex or extreme experience… no longer serviceable…” (paraphrased from Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets).

In the poem from Second Space, “Tenant” Milosz tells a story of a Soviet officer in 1940 Wilno when the city was taken over by “our Eastern neighbor:”

…He had been taught that there was no God or devil, and so he marveled at the sight of crowds praying in churches.


It gave rise to a bitter feeling at the futility of human belief and of the supplications sent up to the throne of Absence.


It is probable that he meditated on evil, i.e., on the suffering inflicted on human beings by human beings.


And on the evil for which we, therefore, share responsibility, and on the question of what our obligations are in a world thus ordered…

Milosz is at once compassionate for the officer who “had been taught,” (as opposed to just believing or not) while damning too of his struggle with meaning in the face of an absence of faith, but it is not just the officer that he’s talking about. “We” is only used twice in the poem, but there is also an unspoken we in the last sentence. Apparently the officer could not accept the world “thus ordered,” and he committed suicide that year; the poem ends with:

Most appropriate perhaps to keep silent about religion, for he disappeared without a trace among the millennia of the planet Earth, together with the uncountable others who have never ascended to any consolation.

My first pass on this poem left me wondering why I, sitting in New York 65 years later, should care about a story of a man in a place and time so far away, but it stood out in my memory and only after several readings did I feel the poem tugging at my sleeve. It was the “we” wanting my attention. We couldn’t save the officer and he couldn’t save the lives of those whose lives he refused to take; where is salvation? Also here, he is saying that suffering is not only the responsibility of those doing the inflicting but also of those who do nothing; that questions faith (and perhaps there is here a political statement on the Catholic Church’s long silence on the holocaust). My explanations could never suffice, but I think this is an example of Milosz’s “voices” speaking and what made him a poet whose work can be loved by those who never shared his world.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 31-Mar-2005
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Where Do You Use Your Moleskine?

 

If you’ve read this site for a while, you know I love my Moleskine notebooks. Now, the organizationally obsessed folk at 43Folders point the way to the latest iteration on the notebook’s design with reporter notebooks with a hard cover that flips over the top; “Inspired by the journalistic tradition,” the firm says. These sound useful for those that like to keep something in their jeans pockets everywhere they go.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 29-Mar-2005
• 1 comment »
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Promoting Literature in Translation: Reading the World

 

While the NY Times reveals their lack of understanding about the nature of lit-blogs, others are making good use of the medium. Robert Gray, a bookseller who has a blog at Publisher’s Marketplace is coordinating an effort with the Dalkey Archive Press to increase “public awareness of the pleasures and possibilities inherent in reading literature in translation.” Mr. Gray says of the project:

“I think of Reading the World as the nucleus for an entire month of targeted displays, media coverage (litbloggers can have a strong impact in this area because so many of you are already deeply committed to promoting world literature in translation), and, perhaps most important to me as a bookseller, an endless series of conversations about great books by great authors that just happen to be translated.”

Ah, yes, “endless conversations about great books.” That is what it’s all about. That is what we are trying to do at 400 Windmills, and that’s what we are trying to do here every day (thus ending my NY Times mini-rant).

Below I’ve copied the list of books Mr. Gray intends to read and comment on and hopefully provoke discussion of. It looks like an interesting mix of old and new books, familiar names and obscure. I’ve only read a handful of these, so I may have cause to do some investigating. And hey, that’s what it’s all about.

Archipelago Books:

Lenz by Georg Büchner (Germany), trans. by Richard Sieburth

Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz (Poland), trans. by Bill Johnston

Education by Stone by João Cabral de Melo Neto (Brazil), trans. by Richard Zenith

A Dream of Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu (Russia), trans. by Yazhbin Chavasse

Dalkey Archive Press:

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (Ukraine), trans. by Keith Gessen

Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara (Serbia), trans. by Ana Lučić

Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante (Cuba), trans. by Suzanne Jill levine/Donald Gardner/author

Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia), trans. by Celia Hawkesworth/Damion Searls

Farrar, Straus, & Giroux:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandyr Solzhenitsyn (Russia), trans. by H.T. Willetts

The Collected Poems (Federico García Lorca (Spain), trans. by Christopher Maurer

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (Germany), trans. by Edward Snow

The Vagabond by Colette (France), trans. by Judith Thurman

Knopf:

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (Japan), trans. by Philip Gabriel

Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), trans. by Maureen Freely

Liquidation by Imre Kertész (Hungary), trans. by Tim Wilkinson

Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi (Iran), trans. by Anjali Singh

New Directions:

The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida (Cape Verde), trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño (Chile), trans. by Chris Andrews

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (Germany), trans. by Michael Hulse

A Heart So White by Javier Marías (Spain), trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

p.s. If this is of interest and you happen to be in New York City, remember the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature that I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago.

p.p.s. I’m adding Mr. Gray’s blog (Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller’s Journal) to the roll on the right, so if you don’t already, check in and watch his progress as he talks about all the books he’s reading.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 29-Mar-2005
• 1 comment »
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Memoir No More

 

Last week Bud registered some discontent with the tree-killing spate of memoirs that inundate us, the American reader. Bud asked (and answered) Why are these books getting published?

Here’s my take.

90% of these books are meant to serve one and only one purpose—dollar aggregation. There is simply no other reason why a book by Paris Hilton, Jack Welch, or Jose Canseco would be published. No other reason than someone thought they could make money off it. These memoirs belong to the exact same category of pointless material objects that includes such all-around favorites as snowglobes and diamond rings.

9% of these books are stories of personal carthasis that should have remained in a personal journal or a navel-gazing blog. The only possible value these books might have beyond making $$$ for their publisher are for whatever personal growth authors experienced while writing them. They are perhaps worthwhile to authors’ immediate family and close personal friends, but, really, we have utterly no business reading them.

1% of these memoirs are bonified art and/or historically valuable. For instance, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (published in the 1950s) would fit into this category. Unfortuantely, I really can’t think of any memoir published since that fits into this category. Perhaps there are some. Who knows; as quantum physics has instructed us, anything is possible. (I imagine that the works of some essayists and prose stylists would fit in as well, but unless you are on a vacation that includes drinks with cocktail umbrellas, you should be spending your time elsewhere.)

Now then, we are left with one question. It’s a depressing fact that Paris Hilton’s memoir brings in considerable bucks to a publisher. Can we justify the existence of P. Hilton’s book on the basis that it’s possibly subsidizing several works of genuine literary value?

I think the answer is No. First off, this memoir craze encourages publishers to throw huge advances at celebrities in hopes of pulling in that blockbuster memoir. We all know how well this business model has worked for Hollywood.

Second, even though the authors of these memoirs are huge stars that get massive TV coverage every time they burp, their books somehow seem to suck down immense sums of a publisher’s advertising budget. Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of promoting P. Hilton’s memoir, publishers put those dollars into getting new and interesting authors noticed?

So, in other words, I can’t see much good that these books are doing. I, for one, would be happier without them.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 28-Mar-2005
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