Regarding the troubled end and conclusion of week 16. Puff puff puff — almost there, almost there. As we near the close of this adventure, my question this week is, what’s next for you? I know a lot of folks read other books while they deathmarch, but I’ve pretty much been reading just this, with the exception of a brief dive into “Dean and Me (A Love Story)” by Jerry Lewis.
It’s looking like my next book — not next deathmarch, just the next thing I’m hoping to read — will be “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which I somehow never got around to. A friend picked up a copy recently, and I think I’m gonna tag along. The other contender is an interesting bit of recent history called “The Nightingale’s Song” that one of my brothers lent me for a couple of lawn-chair page-flips when I was away on vacation.
How about you — anything in the on-deck circle? Next Wednesday: let’s meet up at the end of Chapter LXV (892 Grossman), just before what may well be my favorite italic chapter opening line yet (is there a technical term for that feature?): “Which recounts what will be seen by whoever reads it, or heard by whoever listens to it being read.).
19 comments for “The Don Quixote Deathmarch, Week 17”
Computilo
July 20, 2006 at 7:35 am
I’ve just finished reading Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. It’s a fascinating story. Nemirovsky was a bestselling Jewish novelist from Russia who emigrated to France in the 1920’s. The novel is a gripping account of occupied France during World War II. In Nemirovsky’s real life, she was eventually deported to a concentration camp and killed. Her children were hidden and escaped, but kept her notes and draft of the novel. They worked with another author to publish the novel. Although Suite Francaise is a novel, it has more than the expected element of reality especially given the circumstances. It’s not exactly “light” reading, but it’s also not got the heft of DQ. I’m not recommending that we use this as the next March book, but I’d certainly recommend that others read this.
In relevant pop culture news, let me draw your attention to the new Entertainment Weekly, which has a feature on the “50 Greatest Sidekicks of All Time.”
Coming in strongly at #14 is our very own Sancho Panza. Huzzah! For those of you who do not read said publication, or who do not wish to search for it online, here is the writeup (and I am not quoting it because I think it’s a particularly good or insightful writeup, just as a for-the-record thang):
“Quixote may be the star of Miguel de Cervantes’ deeply ironic, surprisingly modern satire of macho heroism, but Sancho is the earthy Everyman. Grubby, even criminal, tasks come easily to the unabashedly ungallant Sancho. He also serves as the voice of truth — those fearsome giants are only windmills, and the Quixote’s shiny helmet is a barber’s basin. Ultimately, Sancho’s most important duty may be to rescue his master from his worst foe: himself.”
Also, for the record, let it be known that Sancho falls BELOW such dubious sidekick choices as Donkey from the Shrek movies and Tattoo from Fantasy Island. Also, even more disturbingly, he only scored one notch above Andrew Ridgely, the half of Wham! that was not George Michael.
Draw your own conclusions.
I did not finish my M.A.; I did all the coursework and studied a lot for the thesis, but only wrote ten pages… on discourse markers in English, as demonstrated in _Zen and the Art_!
To Death Marchers past and present:
While you’re talking about other books, have you been hearing about the mini-fiasco surrounding the new Pynchon book? Slate sums it up nicely here: http://www.slate.com/id/2146152/ but in short, an author-written summary made it up on Amazon for about a second, and some crafty netizen was able to capture it. Penguin has since confirmed that TP wrote it. (The slate article links to it, probably too long to include here). Anyway, read the thing. It reawakened, for me, all the humor and frustration of reading GR, way back when.
YS
P.S. Apologies if this is old news for all of you. I’m never quite sure how much escapes my tiny little NY bubble.
In these final sections, I find myself thinking of Pirandello’s “Henry V.” The story (in a far more complicated way than I will make it sound) is of a wealthy man who suffers a head injury. He believes himself to be Henry V of the HRE. His agents hire actors to play his advisors and rework his world to be that of Henry V. He eventually comes to his senses but tells no one because he enjoys his new role and relishes living in the fantasy. I won’t spoil the ending, but having read that I wonder how much DQ really knows.
For my part, 1/3 of the way thru this book I vowed never to read again unless there was the promise of a mug at the end.
Then today I had this terrible thought. What if the mug proves to be my insula, either because it doesnt really exist and our yearning for it was created solely for the enjoyment of Cecil Vortex, or because it wont really be as good as I thought it would be?
I probably would have signed up for a Motorcycle Maintenance Deathmarch though.
Thank you Computilo for providing more than I wanted to know about preparing acorns for eating. However Dr. Vitz’s comment makes me think I won’t go to all the trouble to whip up some acorn pancakes. Sort of like why I don’t eat crab legs–too much work for such a small payoff.
Enjoyed stellasauce & So-Called Bill ruminations on Bush’s use & mangling of aphorisms. But I cling to the hope that future history will show that we all misunderestimated our current leader.
As far as what the next deathmarch might be about, it’s hard to recommend a book I haven’t read. But as I think back, there is a book I read about 45 years ago, after my freshman year of college, that I’m sure had a lifechanging influence on my life: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, first published in 1932. I’m sure, like I have observed repeatedly about DQ, it would be interesting to see how many things have stood the test of time & are still relevent to our current predicaments.
My next read is looking to be John Gardner’s Grendel. I last read it about 15 years ago, but have added it to the syllabus for a class I’ll teach next year, so the refresher is a necessity.
Now to Bush and language – I was thinking recently wrt the Patriot Act how people say the government intrusion in private lives is like 1984. Of course, this is just the lastest application of the metaphor, given how easy it is to track us through technology (ATM or credit card usage, automatic toll payments, internet usage, etc.). But what struck me recently is that Orwell’s big point in the book is really about the control of language as a way of controlling thought – newspeak will eventually make thoughtcrime impossible. In that respect, the world has been Orwellian so long it is hard to remember when it wasn’t. After all, when our bombs hit civilians, that is colateral damage, and when they hit our troops, that is friendly fire. In fact, the official government name for the neutron bomb is the radiation enhancement device.
The Old Man may be right that we have misunderestimated the current Pres. Bush. His mangling of the language may have set the effort back much more than others advanced it.
Back from an off-line vacation and returning to the march. I should have caught up with Cervantes, but instead read “Let It Come Down” by Paul Bowles. Picked up “The Sheltering Sky” a few weeks back, and Millicent Dillon’s biography of Jane Bowles before that. Figuring that after this deatmarch I’ll read Bowles’s other two novels–what the heck? They’re pretty flat stylistically, almost noir, and go down easy compared to The Greats (apologies to Bowles fans!). It’s nice to spend the summer in Tangier.
Cookie’s point about DQ and Connecticut Yankee reminded me of another chapter in that Wendy Lesser book about re-reading that I mentioned a couple weeks back. She compared Huckleberry Finn to Don Quixote, arguing that Twain modeled the Huck/Jim relationship on Sancho and the Don. She goes on to claim that Twain is deliberately setting himself up against Cervantes, trying to top him with a sort of American DQ. I wonder if Cervantes was a major influence on all of Twain’s works. There, I did it! A comparsion that’s not movies or T.V.!
So let me ask my fellow publishing pros in the crowd, or any bilinguists present: Does it mean anything that Don Quixote is taken to a printshop, and immediately after whisked off to see the “galleys”? Just a coincidence?
I’m jealous that Rodney K was able to make a DQ comparison not related to movies or TV. Especially because I am about to refer to another film, albeit a documentary. I cite it not as a comparison, but as an interesting secondary source if you will: “Lost In La Mancha.” It tracks Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt at turning DQ into a film – a feat that even Wells couldn’t achieve after 30 years of trying. It’s worth watching mostly to witness Gilliam’s infatuation with the book. What I liked best was a comment that scriptwriter Tony Grisoni (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas;” “Queen of Hearts”) made about the Don: we love the Don because he is crazy. The reason for this lies in the fact that his delusions are rooted in the kind of imagination we possessed as children. Like there is something almost nostalgic and fantastical about his delusions that we find comforting. He makes another point which I will not reveal because it’s a spoiler (I’m actually running behind and it spoiled it a little for me). Like Grisoni’s comment, I find these final weeks’ pages bittersweet. Things are coming to a close. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is up next for me. I look forward to another DM though – perhaps “Ulysses?” Perhaps something shorter like “To the Lighthouse?” Keep me posted, Cecil.
I had thought about Ulysses a few hundred pages back but don’t know whether I could take all that “streamy consciousness” (call me Sancho) after all the non-sequiturs in DQ. Instead of time-traveling, what about Shakespeare? Plenty of sidekicks there in case we start to miss SP. (P.S. I miss him already.)
You know, that shadowy YS put an insidious bug in my ear for the next March. Sure, it’s great to trawl the classics. We sit on transport trains and in noisy cafes with tomes that make us look simultaneously brainy and freakish, sealed off from the twenty-first century in our private Ziplocs of literary excellence. I like that. I feel a little better about my life just carrying the things around.
But what if we did this forthcoming Pynchon? What if, come January, we’re armed with the very latest thing by America’s knottiest living author? What if we were ON THE CREST of a contemporary literary event–one we’d be likely to read about in papers, hear about on NPR, see in the glossies, glimpse in the laps of other passengers on our transport trains, as we were reading it?
The Lighthouse will always be there. But how many chances will we have to read a book that just might become an American classic the very month it comes out? What if this is Spain c. 1595, and we’re reading the first installment of DQ?
What do you think?
I could do Pynchon. I like that idea. I mean, I’m pretty much up for anything but Shakespeare – not that I don’t love the guy, but thought we might march in the 20th/21st century for a change of pace.
I’m definitely interested in the new Pynchon for next January or so (it’s out in December, right?). Good timing too — I think we kicked off the Gravity’s Rainbow DM around the start of that year.
Still thinking of Virginia Woolf as a (relatively) short DM in September or October…..
Shakespeare’s an interesting thought for down the road a bit — funny that that suggestion hadn’t come up till now.
-Cecil
No Shakespeare for me, please. I was scarred for life by Stanley Booth’s Shakespeare Deathmarch back in, hmm, 1988? Something like 30 plays in 12 weeks. Can you say “brain cramp”?
Likewise, I have no stomach for “Ulysses.” I was assigned it for a class but fell behind and abandoned it halfway through, a decision that I’ve never regretted. Can you say “overrated”?
And Cookie, not to bum you out, but I was forced to read “Giants in the Earth” in school, and it is not an experience I remember fondly. Can you say “watching paint dry”?
On the positive tip, tackling a hot-off-the-presses Pynchon is an idea I can get behind. From now on, I resolve to only read books by authors who have been on “The Simpsons.”
I’ve just finished reading Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. It’s a fascinating story. Nemirovsky was a bestselling Jewish novelist from Russia who emigrated to France in the 1920’s. The novel is a gripping account of occupied France during World War II. In Nemirovsky’s real life, she was eventually deported to a concentration camp and killed. Her children were hidden and escaped, but kept her notes and draft of the novel. They worked with another author to publish the novel. Although Suite Francaise is a novel, it has more than the expected element of reality especially given the circumstances. It’s not exactly “light” reading, but it’s also not got the heft of DQ. I’m not recommending that we use this as the next March book, but I’d certainly recommend that others read this.
In relevant pop culture news, let me draw your attention to the new Entertainment Weekly, which has a feature on the “50 Greatest Sidekicks of All Time.”
Coming in strongly at #14 is our very own Sancho Panza. Huzzah! For those of you who do not read said publication, or who do not wish to search for it online, here is the writeup (and I am not quoting it because I think it’s a particularly good or insightful writeup, just as a for-the-record thang):
“Quixote may be the star of Miguel de Cervantes’ deeply ironic, surprisingly modern satire of macho heroism, but Sancho is the earthy Everyman. Grubby, even criminal, tasks come easily to the unabashedly ungallant Sancho. He also serves as the voice of truth — those fearsome giants are only windmills, and the Quixote’s shiny helmet is a barber’s basin. Ultimately, Sancho’s most important duty may be to rescue his master from his worst foe: himself.”
Also, for the record, let it be known that Sancho falls BELOW such dubious sidekick choices as Donkey from the Shrek movies and Tattoo from Fantasy Island. Also, even more disturbingly, he only scored one notch above Andrew Ridgely, the half of Wham! that was not George Michael.
Draw your own conclusions.
I did not finish my M.A.; I did all the coursework and studied a lot for the thesis, but only wrote ten pages… on discourse markers in English, as demonstrated in _Zen and the Art_!
To Death Marchers past and present:
While you’re talking about other books, have you been hearing about the mini-fiasco surrounding the new Pynchon book? Slate sums it up nicely here: http://www.slate.com/id/2146152/ but in short, an author-written summary made it up on Amazon for about a second, and some crafty netizen was able to capture it. Penguin has since confirmed that TP wrote it. (The slate article links to it, probably too long to include here). Anyway, read the thing. It reawakened, for me, all the humor and frustration of reading GR, way back when.
YS
P.S. Apologies if this is old news for all of you. I’m never quite sure how much escapes my tiny little NY bubble.
In these final sections, I find myself thinking of Pirandello’s “Henry V.” The story (in a far more complicated way than I will make it sound) is of a wealthy man who suffers a head injury. He believes himself to be Henry V of the HRE. His agents hire actors to play his advisors and rework his world to be that of Henry V. He eventually comes to his senses but tells no one because he enjoys his new role and relishes living in the fantasy. I won’t spoil the ending, but having read that I wonder how much DQ really knows.
For my part, 1/3 of the way thru this book I vowed never to read again unless there was the promise of a mug at the end.
Then today I had this terrible thought. What if the mug proves to be my insula, either because it doesnt really exist and our yearning for it was created solely for the enjoyment of Cecil Vortex, or because it wont really be as good as I thought it would be?
I probably would have signed up for a Motorcycle Maintenance Deathmarch though.
Thank you Computilo for providing more than I wanted to know about preparing acorns for eating. However Dr. Vitz’s comment makes me think I won’t go to all the trouble to whip up some acorn pancakes. Sort of like why I don’t eat crab legs–too much work for such a small payoff.
Enjoyed stellasauce & So-Called Bill ruminations on Bush’s use & mangling of aphorisms. But I cling to the hope that future history will show that we all misunderestimated our current leader.
As far as what the next deathmarch might be about, it’s hard to recommend a book I haven’t read. But as I think back, there is a book I read about 45 years ago, after my freshman year of college, that I’m sure had a lifechanging influence on my life: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, first published in 1932. I’m sure, like I have observed repeatedly about DQ, it would be interesting to see how many things have stood the test of time & are still relevent to our current predicaments.
My next read is looking to be John Gardner’s Grendel. I last read it about 15 years ago, but have added it to the syllabus for a class I’ll teach next year, so the refresher is a necessity.
Now to Bush and language – I was thinking recently wrt the Patriot Act how people say the government intrusion in private lives is like 1984. Of course, this is just the lastest application of the metaphor, given how easy it is to track us through technology (ATM or credit card usage, automatic toll payments, internet usage, etc.). But what struck me recently is that Orwell’s big point in the book is really about the control of language as a way of controlling thought – newspeak will eventually make thoughtcrime impossible. In that respect, the world has been Orwellian so long it is hard to remember when it wasn’t. After all, when our bombs hit civilians, that is colateral damage, and when they hit our troops, that is friendly fire. In fact, the official government name for the neutron bomb is the radiation enhancement device.
The Old Man may be right that we have misunderestimated the current Pres. Bush. His mangling of the language may have set the effort back much more than others advanced it.
I’m reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind and then Alexander Dumas’ Margaret de Valois, which is about Catholics vs. Hugeuenots in 1572.
Back from an off-line vacation and returning to the march. I should have caught up with Cervantes, but instead read “Let It Come Down” by Paul Bowles. Picked up “The Sheltering Sky” a few weeks back, and Millicent Dillon’s biography of Jane Bowles before that. Figuring that after this deatmarch I’ll read Bowles’s other two novels–what the heck? They’re pretty flat stylistically, almost noir, and go down easy compared to The Greats (apologies to Bowles fans!). It’s nice to spend the summer in Tangier.
Cookie’s point about DQ and Connecticut Yankee reminded me of another chapter in that Wendy Lesser book about re-reading that I mentioned a couple weeks back. She compared Huckleberry Finn to Don Quixote, arguing that Twain modeled the Huck/Jim relationship on Sancho and the Don. She goes on to claim that Twain is deliberately setting himself up against Cervantes, trying to top him with a sort of American DQ. I wonder if Cervantes was a major influence on all of Twain’s works. There, I did it! A comparsion that’s not movies or T.V.!
So let me ask my fellow publishing pros in the crowd, or any bilinguists present: Does it mean anything that Don Quixote is taken to a printshop, and immediately after whisked off to see the “galleys”? Just a coincidence?
I’m jealous that Rodney K was able to make a DQ comparison not related to movies or TV. Especially because I am about to refer to another film, albeit a documentary. I cite it not as a comparison, but as an interesting secondary source if you will: “Lost In La Mancha.” It tracks Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt at turning DQ into a film – a feat that even Wells couldn’t achieve after 30 years of trying. It’s worth watching mostly to witness Gilliam’s infatuation with the book. What I liked best was a comment that scriptwriter Tony Grisoni (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas;” “Queen of Hearts”) made about the Don: we love the Don because he is crazy. The reason for this lies in the fact that his delusions are rooted in the kind of imagination we possessed as children. Like there is something almost nostalgic and fantastical about his delusions that we find comforting. He makes another point which I will not reveal because it’s a spoiler (I’m actually running behind and it spoiled it a little for me). Like Grisoni’s comment, I find these final weeks’ pages bittersweet. Things are coming to a close. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is up next for me. I look forward to another DM though – perhaps “Ulysses?” Perhaps something shorter like “To the Lighthouse?” Keep me posted, Cecil.
I had thought about Ulysses a few hundred pages back but don’t know whether I could take all that “streamy consciousness” (call me Sancho) after all the non-sequiturs in DQ. Instead of time-traveling, what about Shakespeare? Plenty of sidekicks there in case we start to miss SP. (P.S. I miss him already.)
You know, that shadowy YS put an insidious bug in my ear for the next March. Sure, it’s great to trawl the classics. We sit on transport trains and in noisy cafes with tomes that make us look simultaneously brainy and freakish, sealed off from the twenty-first century in our private Ziplocs of literary excellence. I like that. I feel a little better about my life just carrying the things around.
But what if we did this forthcoming Pynchon? What if, come January, we’re armed with the very latest thing by America’s knottiest living author? What if we were ON THE CREST of a contemporary literary event–one we’d be likely to read about in papers, hear about on NPR, see in the glossies, glimpse in the laps of other passengers on our transport trains, as we were reading it?
The Lighthouse will always be there. But how many chances will we have to read a book that just might become an American classic the very month it comes out? What if this is Spain c. 1595, and we’re reading the first installment of DQ?
What do you think?
I could do Pynchon. I like that idea. I mean, I’m pretty much up for anything but Shakespeare – not that I don’t love the guy, but thought we might march in the 20th/21st century for a change of pace.
I’m definitely interested in the new Pynchon for next January or so (it’s out in December, right?). Good timing too — I think we kicked off the Gravity’s Rainbow DM around the start of that year.
Still thinking of Virginia Woolf as a (relatively) short DM in September or October…..
Shakespeare’s an interesting thought for down the road a bit — funny that that suggestion hadn’t come up till now.
-Cecil
No Shakespeare for me, please. I was scarred for life by Stanley Booth’s Shakespeare Deathmarch back in, hmm, 1988? Something like 30 plays in 12 weeks. Can you say “brain cramp”?
Likewise, I have no stomach for “Ulysses.” I was assigned it for a class but fell behind and abandoned it halfway through, a decision that I’ve never regretted. Can you say “overrated”?
And Cookie, not to bum you out, but I was forced to read “Giants in the Earth” in school, and it is not an experience I remember fondly. Can you say “watching paint dry”?
On the positive tip, tackling a hot-off-the-presses Pynchon is an idea I can get behind. From now on, I resolve to only read books by authors who have been on “The Simpsons.”
Right you are, CV, out December 5. And already ranked in the 400s at Amazon, a full third of a year before release. How’s that for preorders? Numbers to make a publisher’s heart leap in any era:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159420120X/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-2996241-6322344?n=283155
Rodney, you could convince me to read anything. Pynchon sounds incredibly alluring, especially if I don’t think about it too much.