Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Don Quixote’s biggest fans

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“…so Samson Carrasco told me, and he’s at any rate one that’s a bachelor of Salamanca, and people of that sort can’t lie, except when the whim seizes them or they have some good reason for it.” (Sancho Panza)

It’s getting to the point where I have trouble remembering a time before I was reading Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. According to my Kindle, I’m about 75% through it now, and I still have nearly 7 hours of reading to do. I don’t imagine I’ll be finished before sometime this weekend.

The profound literary insight that’s made me so rich and famous has enabled me to identify plot parallels between Book 1 and Book 2. In each book, a large portion of the story’s latter half is taken up with a kind of a drama. In the first book, the drama isn’t labeled as such, but the story takes on the form of a stage play. A large group of people are gathered in an inn, and the Aristotelean unities of place and time are observed – three (if I remember correctly) pairs of sundered lovers just happen to be present at once, and obstacles to their love are overcome, leading to happy romantic endings.

In Book 2, the drama is more overt. Don Quixote and Sancho happen upon a hunting party led by a duke and duchess, who turn out to have read Book 1. They are Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s Biggest Fans, and they proceed to merrily torture them, somewhat in the style of Kathy Bates in Misery, though with more charm.

Employing their considerable financial resources, the couple stage scenarios where costumed players present themselves as devils and wizards and ladies in distress, purposely enabling the old madman’s delusions, for the pure entertainment derived from seeing how far he’ll go in his self-destruction. The duchess delights in toying with Sancho, playing on his desire to be governor of an island, testing how far he’ll debase himself in exchange for that prize.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit I found some of it funny.

Being a professional social conservative, I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the old class system. But as I contemplate the humor in Don Quixote, Book 2, I begin to feel like a Jeffersonian Republican. I even start to sympathize with the French Jacobins. Whom I loathe.

But there’s more of Don Quixote to read, so maybe this stage will pass.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Quixotic beauty

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My opinion of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote, based on reading a condensed version long ago, has always been that it’s a very long, difficult book that people read out of a sense of duty, but that few actually enjoy much.

I’m almost 70% through reading it now, and to be honest my opinion hasn’t changed a lot. It was a hilarious book by 17th Century standards, but it’s mostly plain hard work today. Despite amusing moments.

Today’s reading was highlighted by two major scenes. In the first, Don Quixote wishes to view a famous cave, and is lowered into its mouth on a rope by his servant Sancho Panza and their guide. While in the cave, the knight apparently loses consciousness and has a vivid hallucination, which he afterwards relates to his companions. It involves – of course – a castle and a couple famous knights, along with a brief vision of his own lady fair, Dulcinea.

Another big scene is a puppet show presented in an inn (I wish the author had described it in more detail – I couldn’t figure out whether the puppets were marionettes, hand puppets, or shadow puppets. No doubt Cervantes scholars have worked it out). Don Quixote, overwhelmed by the excitement of the drama, comes to the main characters’ rescue, smashing several puppets with his sword. He lives his life poised on the knife edge of delusion.

A topic I meant to discuss in an earlier post, but lost track of, was that of beauty. In a scene in Book 1, Don Quixote discusses with his friend the curate whether books of Chivalric Romance were true stories or not. The curate points out that the books are full of impossible creatures and incidents. Don Quixote’s response appeals to the spiritual – the stories must be true, he argues, because they’re so beautiful.

That’s a fascinating point, so packed that I can’t begin to deal with it here.

Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” All my life I took that as a poet’s hyperbole. More recently I’ve been thinking there’s more to it.

Andrew Klavan’s book, The Truth and Beauty is one I’ve read several times without entirely figuring its point out. But it’s something to do with the idea that Beauty is a real expression of God Himself. In our mundane world, many beautiful things are corrupted by sin, but Beauty in itself is always a pointer to the Gospel. This is particularly notable in the experience of transcendent beauty, as when Wordsworth beheld a field of daffodils, or when Keats contemplated his Grecian urn. Wordsworth’s ecstatic experience of the daffodils actually led him on the road to Christian faith. Klavan thinks Keats would have become a Christian if he’d lived longer.

And it occurs to me that when a sinner repents and turns to Christ during an altar call, breaking down in remorse and suddenly in love with Christ, he’s having an experience not entirely different from those.

Nevertheless, Cervantes insists Don Quixote is wrong. In this world we live in, a thing can be both beautiful and bad. Beauty can be seductive, in a woman or in a story, or in an ideology. Socialism, for instance, is a beautiful ideology that springs from Romantic aspirations. But it leads away from God, and ends in death.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Relating what will be seen there

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I’m sailing along into Book 2 of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote now. I see no reason to disagree with most critics, who think Book 2 is a little smoother and better-conceived than Book 1. The author has more control of his material, and has learned to exploit better the possibilities in his characters.

Sancho Panza, his squire, especially comes into his own. Sancho has always been smarter than his master, in matters of real life, and he’s learning to manipulate him (quite often for his own good).

The scenario at the start of Book 2 is that Don Quixote is resting, somewhat against his will, at home – but his family and friends perceive that he still longs to ride out and have adventures. A new character is introduced – “the bachelor Samson Carrasco.” (I find it amusing that the bachelor’s degree, which has become almost worthless nowadays, once carried enough prestige to function as a title, like “Doctor.”) The bachelor is a well-meaning young man, and he comes up with a clever plan to entrap Don Quixote in his own delusions and force him to give it a rest. Except his plan fails, leaving the old madman at liberty to ride forth to adventure again.

Sancho Panza is a little more successful operating along the same lines. When his master asks him to go to his fair lady “Dulcinea’s” village and find her for him, Sancho doesn’t know what to do, as he’s never actually seen the woman. He solves that problem by waylaying the first three peasant girls he sights riding along the road on asses. The inherent problems that none of the girls is at all beautiful, and that they have no idea what this old scarecrow in armor is talking about, are easily solved. Sancho simply talks Don Quixote’s own language to him – his perceptions, Sancho explains, have been confused by evil enchanters. The old knight is a sucker for evil enchanters.

As I read, I was struck more and more by the resemblance between Don Quixote and today’s Woke college graduates. They have both alike been driven mad through reading and believing insane books. I think it might be a good idea to study Sancho’s strategy, employing similar tactics to disarm the Woke. (The bachelor Samson Carrasco, perhaps because he’s a college graduate himself, was less fortunate in this strategy. Caution is in order.)

I also have to mention one of the actual laughs I experienced in my reading. Cervantes, in the style of his time, provides a long descriptive title to each chapter. But Chapter IX is entitled, “Wherein Is Related What Will Be Seen There.” That’s a nice, dry little gag.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Quixotic minds

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I feel a little like Don Quixote myself today, having taken a journey on Saturday and having come away feeling a bit as if I’d been tossed by windmills.

They held an all-school reunion in my home town this past weekend. Our high school’s history ran from 1915 to 1990, after which year the district was consolidated with that of a neighboring town. The reunion was for everyone who attended the old Kenyon High School (our team was called the Vikings, which shouldn’t surprise you at all). My class was not the most snowy-headed and venerable among those present, but we were well along in that direction. I saw many old friends and acquaintances, some of whom I’d not laid eyes on in almost 60 years.

Yikes!

I strolled with my brothers through the hallways of our old elementary school, which still exists serving its original function, subsequent additions having been built on in stages, pushing ever westward into what used to be our playground.

When I think about it, I realize that I have both good and bad memories of the place. But it’s the bad ones that come to mind when I’m just flipping through the negatives. We discussed the nature of memory, how every time you remember a thing, you overwrite it, as in RAM. Thus, the more often you remember an event, the more unreliable its memory becomes. Do I really have any idea what happened to me?

Don Quixote, the first book of which I’ve now finished, presents a not entirely dissimilar problem. The old, crack-brained “knight” is certain of his perceptions, though no one else sees what he sees. This is no postmodern book, in which we’re supposed to wonder what the truth is. Cervantes is certain of what’s what – one of Don Quixote’s faults is that he refuses to submit to common reason. He’s a victim of pride, though insanity gives him some excuse.

When the curate and the barber, who come to bring him home, manage to lure him back to the inn where he’s suffered previous humiliations, we’re treated to fully three inserted subplots. In each of these episodes, lovers with sundered hearts are reunited through sheer coincidence. One could easily argue that stories like these are fully as fanciful as the Chivalric Romances Cervantes has already condemned. I suppose Cervantes might answer that, a) coincidences are a lot more plausible than the giants and wizards and flying horses of the chivalric stories, and b) such love stories are morally useful, as they assure lovers that God will intervene to bring them together if they only submit to proper social and religious strictures. (If readers who are lovers are disappointed in this expectation, they’ll at least have been kept from sin.)

Don Quixote is a sinner too, if an amusing one. His humiliations are the fruits of pride, and the same goes for those of Sancho Panza, who’s willing to become a blind man led by the blind, in his ambition to be governor of an island.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

The Counterproductive Dream

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It was on Facebook or Twitter, just today, that somebody mentioned the movie, “The Shootist.” I commented that it was a very faithful adaptation of the novel, except that the final action (altered on John Wayne’s insistence) changed the entire point of the story.

Much the same could be said about “Man of La Mancha,” the blockbuster Broadway production inspired by (not based on, as the writers insisted) Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

I’ve never actually seen the musical, but I heard the songs multiple times, as my college roommate (confined today to a mental institution, I kid you not) was a Broadway musical nut. He especially loved “Man of La Mancha,” which was appropriate, because he never quite found a place in the real world.

“Man of La Mancha” takes the form of a play within a play. We find Miguel de Cervantes in prison, awaiting trial before the Spanish Inquisition (I don’t think that ever actually happened to him). The other prisoners try to steal his trunk of possessions, but their leader agrees to give him a “trial.” He is permitted to present a defense of his writing, and he makes it in the form of a play based on his novel. All the prisoners then act out the story.

The play includes the song, “The Impossible Dream” (performed above by the great Richard Kiley, who created the role) which became one of the monster hits of the second half of the 20th Century. I remember when it was new. It’s a splendid song, one of Broadway’s jewels. It’s also the precise opposite of Cervantes’ meaning.

Cervantes was delivering a warning against becoming so idealistic that you lose contact with reality. As a Christian, he understood that the body as well as the spirit must become sanctified. Don Quixote doesn’t only make a fool of himself. He injures people – and might have killed some of them if he’d been a little more accurate with his lance. He does kill a man’s sheep. He damages an innkeeper’s property and is too lofty-minded to even pay his bill.

Continue reading The Counterproductive Dream →
Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Thinking about Don Quixote

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“…and to put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in condition….”

I am now about a third of the way through Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It’s quite a trek, and it offers ample fodder for thought. This thought, of course, I propose to dump in your lap.

It would be easy to call Don Quixote an attack on “chivalry.” It is that, in the sense that it parodies a literary genre called “Chivalrous Romance.” However, it’s far from an attack on the concept itself. Considering the general (low) character displayed by so many of the world’s great writers, Cervantes stands as something like a paragon. He fought bravely for his king in the Mediterranean wars against Islam, suffering a permanently crippled left hand (or arm) at the Battle of Lepanto. He was captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved for five years, leading several escape attempts, which all failed. In each case, he endured torture and refused to name any of his partners – in one instance nearly being executed. (Eventually he was ransomed.) He did father an illegitimate daughter, but he acknowledged her and saw to her upbringing.

What Cervantes seems to recognize in the Chivalrous Romance genre is, first of all, its poor quality. He was himself a great writer, and had no patience for shoddy work. But he seems to particularly object to the unreality of the stories. As a disabled veteran, he knew the real face of war. He must have found many of the Romances contemptible, just as a genuine secret agent might sneer at a James Bond movie from the Roger Moore era.

He sees even more, though. Don Quixote, through excessive reading of such pop literature, has lost touch with reality. He has entered a virtual world, walking around like a gamer in Google glasses, stumbling over actual physical objects in his path.

Andrew Klavan says that one of the most common objections he hears from Christians in regard to his fiction is, “But fiction isn’t real!”

Good fiction is real, in a profound sense (related to subcreation as Lewis and Tolkien understood it). But trash literature, written to amuse the reader through catering to his predilections and sugar-coating life’s tragedies, does interfere with serious, moral thought. (Straight farce, as in Wodehouse, I would insist, is another matter.)

Or so it seems to me.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Errant in La Mancha

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A further counsel bear in mind:
If that thy roof be made of glass, 
It shows small wit to pick up stones 
To pelt the people as they pass.

“Sir, one solitary swallow does not make the summer….”

“…for it is my great familiarity with thee that has bred this contempt.”

I’ll need to beg your forbearance for a few days – or weeks. I feel I must cut back on my book-buying for a while, so I made up my mind to tackle one of those big, classic books that I’ve been putting off. Therefore I chose Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. This project must inevitably take a long, long time, because it’s a long, long book.

I’m not unacquainted with Don Quixote, since I read an edited version back when I was in high school. But I recall a college professor saying that shortened versions omit some of the most delightful parts. I’m curious to see what those delightful parts are, because – to tell the truth – what I’ve read of the book to date has never given me a lot of pleasure.

[At the top of this post I list a few common aphorisms I found in the text. Whether Cervantes coined them or borrowed them, I have no idea.]

I think of Don Quixote as “the book that, when they wanted to make a successful musical out of it, they had to turn its meaning completely on its head.”

Which brings me back to my old do-it-yourself psychological diagnosis – you can figure out any person’s neurosis through discovering what they don’t find funny. When we neurotics recognize ourselves in a joke, the humor drops abruptly through the floor.

I, for instance, am not much amused by stories about deluded bookworms who make fools of themselves in the world, and get laughed at behind their backs.

Anyway, I’m still less than a quarter through in my reading, and I’ve come up with one thought that may or may be of value: Don Quixote is the ancestor of the modern college graduate, who has been force-fed so much otherworldly theory that he can’t see reality at all. The liberal who observes a city sidewalk covered with homeless tents and human excrement, and calls it “vibrant,” is brother to Knight of the Doleful Countenance, who thought windmills were giants and country inns castles. The liberal who sees a tattooed thug beating up an old woman to steal her purse, and calls him a victim of racism, was foreshadowed when Don Quixote liberated a group of convicts on their way to the galleys, only to be pelted with stones by them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Midsomar Manor,’ by Bruce Beckham

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I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill mysteries. They’re far from my favorite detective books, but they’re amusing and pretty consistent in quality. Also, they don’t work hard to offend me.

Murder at Midsomar Manor, number 27 in the series, was not one of the best. It short-changed me, I thought, in my favorite character (Skelgill himself), and offered way too much of my least-favorite character.

Judging by the book’s title, one might guess that this was some kind of riff on the popular “Midsomer Murders” TV series. However, though it does deal with television, it’s the reality TV genre that’s portrayed (and satirized) here.

Everyone at the police station is excited that the popular series, “Friend or Foe,” is being filmed at a neighborhood spot – the remote Midsomar Manor, which is located on a local lake with which Inspector Skelgill (great fisherman that he is) is quite familiar. He is fascinated by a legend of a gigantic prize pike that lives in the lake (and which will come to figure in the plot).

The program’s competition involves 12 celebrities, 3 of whom are arbitrarily and secretly designated as “foes.” Each night one competitor will be voted out by the others, as being most likely to be a foe. And each day one of them will be “murdered” (eliminated). The hope is that all the foes will be eliminated before they can “kill off” the rest of the players.

But when one of the celebrities, a very unpopular public figure, is actually murdered, the police must take charge. Unfortunately, the case is given to Detective Inspector Smart, Skelgill’s great rival and a thoroughgoing ass (who also happens to be stupidly star-struck). To her own alarm, Skelgill’s female subordinate, DS Jones, is assigned to assist him, which involves putting off his frequent sexual advances.

DI Smart is proven wrong again and again, but arrogantly manages to blame Jones each time. Fortunately, Inspector Skelgill is just off stage, out on the lake in his fishing boat, ready to step in and set things right in the end.

The first thing that annoyed me about Murder at Midsomar Manor was that the cameras (and there are a lot of them in this story) are pointed so much at DI Smart and DS Jones. It passes plausibility that any male in today’s Britain could hold an inspector’s post while being as blatantly sexist as Smart is (setting aside the fact that he’s an idiot). Smart’s egregious behavior becomes genuinely tiresome, even for a known sexist like me.

Also, the solution, which comes by way of Skelgill toward the end, hangs on a pretty implausible coincidence. Uncomfortably close to a deus ex machina.

And just as a note, the author misuses the phrase, “begs the question” and mistakes “flaunt” for “flout.”

Murder at Midsomar Manor was entertaining, as is the whole series. But this one reached too far for farce, and lacked plausibility.

Bookselling, Uncategorized

Post-event report: The Red River Valley Renaissance Faire

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This is not the Red River Valley Renaissance Faire. I didn’t get a picture there. This is the Viking Age Club of Minnesota at the very last Norsk Høstfest in Minot, ND last year. Our turnout in Fargo last weekend was considerably smaller.

I am back, unscathed (though more than a little stiff and sore) from the Red River Valley Renaissance Faire in Fargo. It was a good event, and I feel each and every one of my multitudinous years.

The faire was impressive. One always compares these things to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in Chanhassen, which boasts permanent buildings on a large site. This Fargo operation is much smaller, and repurposes some of the buildings of the North Dakota State Fair, along with pre-fab, disassemblable constructions of their own, on top of all the tents of the participants (like your humble servant). We Vikings had a space all our own in one corner of the precincts, and we were quite happy and visible there.

The weather was warm, but not uncomfortably hot. The big problem was the legendary North Dakota wind, which tended to lift my awning/shade off its center pole, so that I finally gave up using that pole, and learned to love the low ceiling.

Book sales were good. Saturday was the best day – business started slow, but picked up in the afternoon. More than one person looked at my books, promised to come back and buy later – and actually did so, which doesn’t often happen. I went from worrying that I’d have no sales to wondering if I’d run out of some books. Which did not occur, but it’s a good problem to have to worry about.

For a smaller Renaissance faire, this one was memorable. Near us was a display of raptors, tended by a pair of falconers – they had red-tailed hawks, several kinds of owls, and even a turkey vulture. (Call me prejudiced, but I will never love turkey vultures.) Further down the line was an exotic menagerie, featuring a camel, an albino wallaby, and otters. (So I heard; I didn’t spring for the entrance fee.) Gymnasts worked a high trapeze. I ate a corn dog each day – I don’t often get to eat “fair food.”

Saturday was busier than Sunday, but I sold a good number of books overall. Got to watch the diverse cavalcade of humankind living out its fantasies with various levels of success. Had a few good conversations. Benefited, once again, from the hard work of younger Vikings for my setup and takedown. Didn’t get home till after midnight last night.

I’m told they want us back next year. I’ll happily return.

If my old legs can still walk a year from now.

Music, Religion

Sissel: ‘Eg veit i himmerik ei borg’

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When I lack a book to review, Scandinavian hymns are my go-to fallback, as you’ve probably noticed. I’m sure I’ve posted Sissel singing ‘Eg Veit i Himmerike Ei Borg‘ before, probably in a different performance (she does it here with the Heretic Tabernacle Choir), but I never get tired of this particular one.

The song sounds to me like a medieval hymn, but it’s not quite that. The tune is an old Norwegian folk song, and the words were translated from a pre-17th Century German hymn. The Norwegian translation was done in 1905. James Cameron, so the story goes, heard Sissel’s rendition and hired her to do the background vocals for “Titanic.”

You can see the lyrics and a translation on this Wikipedia page.

I like to sing this one to myself sometimes when I’m hanging around the Viking camp, since it seems period-appropriate. Only I can never remember the verse that starts “Men visst eg veit ein morgon renn” probably because I misheard the lyrics completely.

No blog post from me tomorrow. See you Monday, God willing.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture