Literature Humanities 07-08

Give me your hands, if we be friends

Unbelievable. We're done. Through. Finito. Ende. Odysseus is back in Ithaka. Quixote is Quexana again. Hamlet Prime has been avenged. Lizzy and Charles Darcy are living happily ever after. Dante's been to Hell and back. We've suffered though Montaigne's kidney stones and sailed out to the lighthouse. We've seen Leonidas stand and Troy fall. Oedipus and Raskolnikov have learned their lessons. Achilles has made his choice and so has Lt. Cross. Socrates has told us his secrets; Hamlet has kept his.

It's been my great pleasure and absolute privilege to be Virgil to your Dante, Don Quixote to your Sancho. Thank you for your good humor and willingness to play along. I looked forward to our sessions every week and would sign up, in a heartbeat, to take another ride with you all.

If you'd like to leave a thought or two about the course as a whole, please use the comments thread here to do so.

Wishing you all the best here at Columbia and undiscovered happiness out there on the wine-dark sea, 

Jeff

I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you around the waist,
My right hand point to landscapes of continents, and a plain public
road.

Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it yourself.

It is not far...it is within reach...

-Uncle Walt

To Zora

One last bizarre piece of Jeffness for the road as we wind up here....

Olu Dara, bluesman/jazz trumpeter/father of Nas/all-around badass, recorded this track, which seems to me to be a sort of ode to Zora Neale Hurston. See what you think.

Also-our new (and last) weekly image is "Flag" by Jasper Johns.
Try staring at the green version of the flag for a few seconds and then looking at the ghost-flag at the bottom.

Larger image here:

3192 years ago today....

...a famous gift was given. Not sure how they got the day, let alone the year.

Lit Hum Clipfest 2008

We don't have time to spend class doing this, so here's what I'm thinking, but it's not set in stone.

Lit Hum Clipfest & Food
Sunday, April 27th
6-8pm. Location TBD.
Food TBD (We can do whatever we want here, as long as we get a receipt(s) that does not include alcohol).

This of course is totally optional and just for fun. I know the end of the semester is crazy-making for you all, so it seems to me that this slot is better than pushing it to the next weekend.

The idea is to sort of mark the end of a long, good year with as little stress as possible. Anyway, let me know your thoughts in the comments here (time, day, cuisine, etc).

Jeff

Friday Morning Nabokov

From 1953 to 1961, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), butterfly fanatic and literary titan, gave a series of lectures on classic literature at Cornell. These have achieved something like mythic status in the literary world (though not necessarily the scholarly one).

While he is by my estimation the 4th most famous Vladimir of all time (behind Lenin, Putin, and the Impaler), many argue that Nabokov, a Russian emigre, was the best English prose stylist of the 20th century (your instructor would be inclined to agree). So to hear his take on masterworks like Don Quixote is fascinating and I include some snippets here to get you in the mood to finish the reading for Monday. The reading which you have diligently been doing little by little over break as I suggested and not at all put off until Monday morning to cram and try to scrape by the quiz. I thought so.

Anyway, here we go.

On the "real world" in Don Quixote:
We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called “real life” in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

On the "form":
What we shall witness now is the evolution of the epic form, the shedding of its metrical skin, the hoofing of its feet, a sudden fertile cross between the winged monster of the epic and the specialized prose form of entertaining narration, more or less a domesticated mammal, if I may pursue the metaphor to its lame end. The result is a fertile hybrid, a new species, the European novel.

On its "influence":
Some critics, a very vague minority long dead, have tried to prove that Don Quixote is but a stale farce. Others have maintained that Don Quixote is the greatest novel ever written. A hundred years ago one enthusiastic French critic, Sainte-Beuve, called it “the Bible of Humanity.” Let us not fall under the spell of these enchanters.

On what do take away from it:
We should, therefore, imagine Don Quixote and his squire as two little silhouettes ambling in the distance against an ample flaming sunset, and their two huge black shadows, one of them especially elongated, stretching across the open country of centuries and reaching us here.

Happy La Mancha-ing, Jeff

PS: Jeff's Nabokov picks ---1. Lolita (duh) 2. Pale Fire 3. Speak, Memory

The Multimedia Don

DQ has inspired a great many derivative works...some more successful than others. Here's a smattering, but first, common phrases that come from Don Quixote.

"in a pickle"    "too much of a good thing"    "wink of sleep" "sky's the limit"   
"give the devil his due"    "wild-goose chase" "mind your own business"   
"within a stone's throw" "thou has seen nothing yet"  "cry my eyes out"
"the truth, and nothing but the truth" "I smell a rat"  "the fair sex"
"turn over a new leaf"    "haves and have-nots" "no love lost"   
"honesty's the best policy" "my word is as good as my bond" "mum's the word"
"born with a silver spoon in his mouth"
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My first exposure to DQ was through the musical version, first performed in 1966. There are some problems with it (the flamenco-infused soundtrack is for some inexcusable, since flamenco didn't yet exist in 1600), but it does capture some of the Don's romanticism. While The Impossible Dream
is now the best -known song  from it, I, Don Quixote is my favorite. Surely Richard Kiley's baritone is what a real singing hero would sound like. And yes, I just wrote "real singing hero."    
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There have been several film versions of Don Quixote, but none of them have really succeeded either artistically or commercially. Ironically, the two versions that had the best chance never made it through production. Orson Welles began shooting a version of DQ that placed the Don and Sancho in contemporary Mexico. Financial difficulties and Orson's own craziness doomed the project

and no authoritative version has ever seen the light of day. What I have seen of it is really quite beautiful, even without post-production. (Note: There is a long introduction by a Welles scholar that's not terrible, but if you want to skip to the main course, the actual footage starts at the 5 minute mark). The other version I'm keeping in my pocket for now...
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Those of you who have any exposure to Kafka are probably not surprised that he was fascinated by DQ. He even went so far as to write a counter-fable, which I include here in its entirety:

THE TRUTH ABOUT SANCHO PANZA by FRANZ KAFKA
Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.
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And finally, getting back to Cervantes himself, here is an audio version of Chapter 1 in the original Spanish. This is absolutely useless to me, but if you have some Spanish, perhaps it is interesting (?).
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Final note: Our weekly image is Picasso's "Don Quixote"

The Readiness is All

As seems to happen every time, I'm intoxicated by Hamlet. Consider yourself warned.
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I mentioned Shakespeare's contribution to the vocabulary of the English language. See for yourself. How was there no word for "bedroom" before spritely young Will came along?
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Harold Bloom, the best-selling critic of the last half-century, wrote "Shakespeare is my model and my mortal God." And so what does he think of Hamlet? "It is a testimony, indeed, to the power of the mind over a universe of death." Fawn much?
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From the Department of Practicality: searchable Hamlet full-text. If my past experience is any guide, many of you will find this useful in writing assignments to come.
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And lest I link too rhapsodic, some perhaps-needed levity from the bowels of YouTube.

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New weekly image is from the 1603 edition of Hamlet.

Essay It Ain't So....

So, it turns out that the bit about the heart being preserved in the chapel at Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne is probably a myth. I'm still looking into this, but it doesn't look good....

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Anyway, our new weekly image is of the tower at his Chateau to which Montaigne retired for a decade (more or less). Here are some other location shots to soothe those February blues.

The Church Saint Michel de Montaigne

Chateau Montaigne (note especially the inscription on the ceiling that I mentioned in class)

I'm going to visit these places someday. Hells yea I am.

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Speaking of towers, if you're wondering how bad the political/social turmoil had to be for Montaigne to do hole up in one, this map gives you some sense of the chaos of late 16th Century France. (Note: 1585 was the year Montaigne was elected mayor of Bordeaux)

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One last bit of randomness. Not sure if you saw it or not, but there's an article in the Spec today about Lit Hum. So when you're slogging through your essay over the next couple of days, just remember there's a GS student out there somewhere wishing they were you.

Paper Puppets + James Cromwell =.....The Inferno (!?)

I was trying to get full-length copy, but it doesn't sound like that will happen. So I offer the trailer instead. I can't determine the awesome-to-ridiculous ratio here. Help.

Auden v. Virgil

Auden's "Secondary Epic" is one of the more famous poet-on-poet smackdowns, though Twain's evisceration of James Fenimore Cooper is my personal favorite.

Here's a snippet:

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No, Virgil, no:

Behind your verse so masterfully made

We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.

Your Anchises isn’t convincing at all:

It’s asking too much of us to be told

A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows

That Romulus will build a wall,

Augustus found an Age of Gold,

And is trying to teach a dutiful son

The love of what will be in the long run,

Would mention them both but not disclose

(Surely, no prophet could afford to miss,

No man of destiny fail to enjoy

So clear a proof of Providence as this.)

The names predestined for the Catholic boy

Whom Arian Odovacer will depose.

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*Odovacer, a German "barbarian" who served Attila for awhile, deposed Romulus Augustus (aka "Little Augustus") in 476. Romulus Augustus is the "Catholic boy" in the poem: most of the Western Roman Empire was Catholic at this time.