And then before you know it, it’s Week 5, regarding the diverting comments posted by the readers of this agreeable history.
Much sound and fury this week regarding potential casting and music for the movie. And out of that dust a clear path emerges: Melody’s vision of a DQ update that we’d have to assume would be titled “Dude, Where’s My Papers Promising Me Those Donkeys?”
As I mentioned along the way, I dug this week. I did. The book has really started to pick up some 400-year-old steam. 200-something pages down. 700 or so to go…. If you’re a tad behind, not to worry — just keep a goin’. There’s still plenty of time to catch up on some upcoming sunny weekend afternoon.
Next Wednesday: We shake out our shoes at the end of Chapter XXXIII, one half-whisker shy of the continuation of the novel of The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious.
follow-up to melody from previous thread–i was a put off by the SJP-as-rocinante suggestion until i remembered her previous role in tim burton’s mars attacks! in which she became a little dog, sort of–do i have that right, burton people?–so maybe that’s where the idea came from.
you’re right about Mars Attacks, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think it was because, like SJP, Rocinante was one of the promising young stars featured in the ’80s tv sensation “Square Pegs.” Also, before he was married to SJP, Mathew Broderick was married to Rocinante.
-Cecil
When I hit the tilting at windmills scene, I found myself thinking that I had covered all the material I really knew about DQ and had read very little of the whole at that point. It’s now becoming abundantly clear that much of the novel is not DQ’s adventures, but the backstory of the other folks he encounters.
There is a Canterbury Tales element to the whole thing – one big frame to justify the inclusion of many unrelated tales. And like Chaucer, the tales seem as though they would have been familiar to the readers who were contemporary to the novel. And also like Chaucer, there is a great deal of advantage gained by placing a story of chivalry right next to that is ribald & rude.
Oh! And, Cecil, I do believe Rocinante appeared again as Carrie’s lover – he was the Wall Street Analyst who was “Mr. Perfect” until she discovered him early one morning in her closet with nothing on but one of her sequins bras and a pair of Monolos. The next episode (“Unlucky Horse Choo”) explored how Carrie coped emotionally with the fact that not only were her favorite Monolos flattened into the thiness of a eucharistic wafer but Rocinante ran off with her Marc Jacobs slouchy bag (which he mistook to be a feeder) and left some very pungent deposits all over her vintage Jimmy Choos.
my favorite understatement & PC statement this week: “Her extreme grace, charm, and comeliness delighted everyone and confirmed that Don Fernando was a man of limited understanding for having cast aside so much beauty.”
Dr. Vitz makes a good point re: Chaucer. I keep thinking that it’s like reading a book of fairytales. I keep thinking “where have I read this before?”
So far this week I count references to “Dude, Where’s My Car?”, “Square Pegs,” “Mars Attacks,” “Sex and the City,” and “The Canterbury Tales.” But the one that keeps occurring to me is “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I don’t doubt that if Don Quixote got his arms and legs chopped off, he would insist that it’s just a flesh wound. And there’s some sort of equivalency between Sancho and the guy who who rides alongside brave Sir Robin singing songs about him.
In chapter 27 we have a girl trying to pass as a boy and a boy as a girl. This device has been used so many times since, but was Cervantes the first to use it?
Chapter 31 had a number of things worth noting. DQ’s conflict in being told to go see Lady D while on his way to cut off the giant’s head for the princess, and deciding that he has to finish what he’s started first. Sancho’s argument that DQ ought not to pass up the rewards of helping the princess and marry her, in effect forgetting about Lady D, because “a bird in the hand is better than a vulture in the air.”
Reflecting what Spain was involved in at that time, Sancho wants a kingdom where he can profit as a slave trader: “Choose the part along the coast, because…I can put my black vassals on a ship and do with them things I said I would do.”
Loved the part where DQ finds out how his help actually turned out, and Andres states “For the love of God, Senor Knight Errant, if you ever run into me again, even if you see them chopping me to pieces, don’t help me and don’t come to my aid, but leave me alone in my misfortune; no matter how bad it is, it won’t be worse that what will happen to me when I am helped by your grace, and may God curse you and all the knights errant ever born in this world.”
Thank you for the Square Pegs reference. Dont forget Marshall(?) the geeky kid who is always on his quixotic quest for the hot babe, Slash as his dim witted, but lovable sidekick. I loved that show until the episode where Slash contemplates entering the slave trade to get money for his band.
I keep getting caught up on these un PC parts sprinkled throughout the book: the Old Christians are much better than the new Christians; Sancho regrets his final reward may be a kingdom of blacks; and forget about those Moors who cant understand the error of their ways.
DQ is the first modern novel we are told. It makes fun of many aspects of society. And apparently it has contributed so much to classic and pop culture which was to follow, according to prior posts. So, is it too much to ask that Cervantes be a little more enlightened than his times when it comes to some of these issues? Maybe so.
On another notes, one of my favorite lines this week: DQ is inquiring about Sanchos meeting with Dulcinea and what she was doing at the time. Sancho says she was not stringing pearls, but winnowing wheat. DQ asks, “And did you notice my friend, if it was white wheat or ordinary spring wheat?”
Everything in the universe truly is connected.
While camping this week, I took DQ along to read each evening before retiring–al fresco, under the stars, the way our hero would have it done. (Although I will confess that at night, I did not limit my couch to “no other than a flinty rock.”)
At the north end of Death Valley is a mansion known as Scotty’s Castle. The millionaire who built it (who was not “Scotty”–long story) had the interior decorated in the style of Renaissance Spain. Imagine my surprise, along the tour, to discover two 200-year-old tapestries depicting scenes from DQ: the shepherdess Marcela (Chapter 13) and the windmills (Chapter 8).
http://www.nps.gov/deva/Scottys/Scottys_main.htm
a smaller small worldness — last weekend I bought a handful of CDs. And the best of them was Paris 1919 by John Cale. And my favorite song from this disc out the gate was called “Andalucia.” And I wondered: what’s that mean? And then 3 days later, on the boat ride home, page 230 (Grossman): Andalucia!
-Cecil
Question about Qualifying for a Mugnet: I’ve gotten a bit confused about when the weeks actually start and end for the purposes of posting for mugnet eligibility. I know we’re in Week 5, but don’t we switch over on Wednesdays? Perhaps I’m a week behind.
Cecil: Can you clarify for us slow-witted Sanchos out here? After all, some of us are “no longer interested in insulars, or insula, or whatever” but we are very interested in a)what comes next for DQ, SP, barbers, squires, priests, madmen, lovers, and very tricky and duplicitous sonneteers who leap from bush to bush like something out of Tolkein. Some of us are still quite mercenary about making sure we don’t lose out on mugnet elibility. Thank you kindly, Cecil et. al.
Hey Computilo,
No problem. The new marker is posted each Wednesday. And the idear is to post about the previous week’s target. Or ya know, donuts or somesuch. So this week, the goal was to get to 27, and on this thread we’d be talking about everything up to 27.
In practice, people keep reading as the week goes on, and it’s common for folks to want to post about what they read that day. There’s no hard and fast rule, but you just want to figure that if you’re talking something from this week’s reading — like something from chapter 30 on this thread, you just try and do so in a way that won’t spoil a significant element of the book for folks who aren’t there yet.
For mugnet qualification, be sure to drop a comment on every week, which I think you’ve been doing all the way through like some sort of admirabe mugnet-qualifying machine.
Does that help?
-Cecil
Vacation was lovely but I’ve missed out on exciting things in Spain, apparently, by leaving DQ behind in San Francisco. I’m back in the saddle (reference clearly intentional) and looking forward to getting caught up. Wish me a sunny weekend. Ha ha.
The further I travel with the Don, the more I get the sense that at bottom, Cervantes is writing a book about books; that the tangled relations between Sancho, DQ and the tumultuous world they inhabit are Cervantes’s way of working out the relationship between readers, writers, and that fragile concept we agree to call “reality.�
This week’s reading had me thinking about that in the scene where Quixote pretends to go mad in order to imitate the noble madness of the knights in his books: “The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason.� (194 Grossman) What a great description of reading! It’s one of those play-within-a-play type moments: the madman deciding to pretend he’s mad, with us the readers watching it all, pretending our mad Don is real (at least real enough to keep us from putting the book down as a fiction, a lie, and going back to physics problems.)
Cecil raised the question for me of how aware DQ is of his own condition: how deliberately has he chosen to escape inside this fantasy? “I imagine that everything I say is true, no more and no less, and I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be in beauty and in distinction.� (201) Like any good reader, he’s decided to choose his illusion. Given that picture of his paltry existence in Chapter 1, I wonder how crazy he really is to want to escape it.
I agree with much of this. I was thinking during these chapters that many of these “other” stories within DQ are presented, in part, to contrast the less honorable/dignified thoughts/actions/behavior of these “real life” characters versus the fantastical virtuous world that DQ thinks he’s part of. As if to say, *this* is what life is really like–not like these damn books of yours.
And in other news, the earlier theories by posters on this board as to my casting decision regarding Sarah Jessica Parker as Rocinante—such as allusions to earlier films, etc–were, in fact, incorrect, though some were quite clever. The truth is that my decision was purely an aesthetic one. Specifically, I think she has a horse face. I mean that only in the good way, of course.
I should probably explain, because not everybody on the march knows Jeff. Jeff is sort of goat-faced. In that he has a tiny mouth with really thin teeth. And a beard. And two knobby lumps on the top of his head.
So any way, when he calls someone “horse faced” or any other kind of “farm-animal-faced,” he really does mean it as a compliment. It’s his way of saying “lansman.”
[insert “ass face” joke here]
-Cecil
I agree with Rodney – this is very much a book about books. As to Jeff’s take that it is presenting these as “real life,” I have my doubts.
Some of these stories feel like stock footage – Cardenio’s story and Romeo’s have so much in common because they both go back to older sources. Tales of romance have messed up plenty of people who mistook a good first date for love at first sight.
Maybe Cervantes is suggesting we all have our own insanities and choose the tales that play to it. DQ’s is just easier to see as a problem.
Wow–the Scotty’s Castle connection is fantastic! I am traveling right now as well but it’s been hard to find the time to read even though I insisted to myself that I had to lug the book along with me.
Real reality, seems like it’s all a matter of degrees. The world of the Barber and Cardenio may not be reality, but it’s a lot more real than DQ’s visions, more real than the formulas in those chilvaric novels, probably more real than much of the literature that came before DQ….
Because everything in this book seems to make me think of comics….it all reminds me of the craze in the ’80s to take superheroes and put them in a “real” world. The world of “the Dark Knight” wasn’t real either. But it was more real than 60s Batman, and it was that contrast that triggered a lot of the sparks. Same here I’d think…. Although with less pictures.
The Penguin as a sort of demented Sancho?
-Cecil
Actually if The Penguin is Sancho, then I think my casting of Jack Black still works.
But I don’t know if we have a part for ol’ Horse Face in this Batman version of DQ.
OK, I’m doing an obligatory donut posting. I’m finally over being sick, but am terribly behind. OK, we’re working on casting the movie. I think this would be another feather in Ian McKellin cap, after being Gandalf, Magneto, and Lord Teabing. OK, so he’s suffering from overexposure, but. . . I think for Sancho, we’re talking Quentin Tarantino. I see him as very scraggly, and hillbilly stupid. And if for no other reason, that as he’s badly overemoting, we get to watch people kick the crap out of him. Oh, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the New England Patriots as the flock of sheep.
Thanks for the Canterbury Tales refferent. I was getting a bit bored waiting for the story to really pick up. I guess these are the stories.
PS, there was a great MadTV ad for Sex in the City, with SJP, who does have a great horse face, played by the long chinned Michael McDonald. He looked great as a long-tressed blonde. Very Funny.
On reality and unreality: We step into shifting sands when it comes to the subject of love. Reading about Cardenio and Dorotea’s stories, which are supposed to have really happened in the novel, invites comparison to DQ’s totally fantasized version. Yet everyone is tearing their hair or lamenting to the stars or shredding their clothes and wandering in the wilderness. Is this totally divorced from our day to day reality? I don’t think so.
Last night I say Guy Maddin at the SF Film Festival. In his movies, lovers, especially ones with lost loves, often walk around like zombies in German Expressionist movies. Maddin talked about his own experience of love in terms of two extremes–being enchanted and being enslaved. Sounds pretty close to our fictional friends, and not so far from things I’ve felt and witnessed when love takes over.
Not to belabor the point (too late?), but I do agree the incorporated stories are closer to reality than DQ’s visions. But some of that is because simple interpersonal relationships are a more regular on-going thing than knight errantry. Cardenio’s story is full of impossible coincidence and unlikely moments. If any of us saw that wedding in a movie, we would laugh at how unbelievable the situation was.
And as much as I agree that DQ is radically different than the literature that came before it, some of these included stories actually are the literature that came before it.