.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Fareed Zakaria: a complacency that may prove deadly.

To contrast: that where Don Quixote’s Spiritual Vision occurs in the depths of the earth in the Cave of Montesino, Sancho Panza’s Vision occurs high over the earth, as he supposes, on the enchanted wooden horse Clavileño.

“Sancho, as you would have us believe what you saw in heaven, I require you to believe me as to what I saw in the Cave of Montessinos. I say now more.” (The contrast of earth and air, master and servant, argues for the artful construction of the book, particularly Part II.)

To grow obsessive over: the color green in Don Quixote, particularly Part II.

The observation that Don Quixote, without being a manifestly pious book, has a much more pro-Christian attitude than, say, the works of Shakespeare, which feel more skeptical and secular. One can certainly see in Don Quixote, knight errant, believer in enchantments, scorned and beaten for his beliefs, Don Quixote the Christian believer in miracles.

This passage in particular brought that out for me recently (Don Quixote speaking):

“I conjure thee, phantom, or whatever thou art, tell me what thou art and what thou wouldst with me. If thou art a soul in torment, say so, and all that my powers can do I will do for thee; for I am a Catholic Christian and love to do good to all the world, and to this end I have embraced the order of knight-errantry to which I belong, the provinence of which extends to doing good even to souls in purgatory.”

Tristram Shandy, too, though bawdy, seems also a lot more Christian in its underlying assumptions than does Shakespeare.

Hanania: if you’re reading this, there’s a better than average chance you’re at least a little bit autistic.

Coulisse: A piece of timber having a groove in which something glides.

Yglesias: All political calculations aside, it genuinely does not make sense to ask Democrats to vote for an appropriations deal that the White House has pre-announced it intends to violate.

Frederick Douglass: There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.

Yglesias: Everyone, every day, has the opportunity to nudge the world in either a saner or less sane direction.

Dibble: To use a dibble; to make holes in the soil for planting.

Wallace Stevens poem “The Comedian as the letter C”:

On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

Making marmelade out of marmals today… marmelade comes from a word meaning “quince,” from which the preserve was originally made.

Yes: “Professors tweeting about their research > professors skeeting replacement level progressive politics takes.”

“What do you think of this, Sancho?” said Don Quixote. “Are there any enchantments that can prevail against true valor? The enchanters may be able to rob me of good fortune, but not of fortitude and courage.” (Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter 17. Revised Ormsby translation.)

« Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. »

*
When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I will have conquered solitude.

I’ve almost edited “Haiku” out of existence, a large opening chunk now out — but I think it does yet still somewhat exist.

So much appreciate these people who can react intelligently in real time to events as they happen; best example today that I’ve come across is Hanania.

Faulkner, Pylon. “The hostler slid, lean and fast, past the golfbag and the gears and under the wheel. Hagood entered stiffly, like an old man, letting himself down into the low seat, whereupon without sound or warning the golfbag struck him across the head and shoulder with an apparently calculated and lurking viciousness, emitting a series of dry clicks as though produced by the jaws of a beast domesticated though not tamed, half in fun and half in deadly seriousness, like a pet shark. Hagood flung the bag back and then caught it just before it clashed at him again. ‘Why in hell didn’t you put it into the rumble?’ he said.”

[Really cool thing about this passage may be how he “flung the bag back and then caught it just before it clashed at him again,” which is how it happens: when something suddenly falls on you your reaction is to do what will keep it from falling rather than to do what is actually needed to stabilize it, so it is very likely to fall back on you again.]

Seneca : “This is the foremost sign of a foolish mind: it tries to take this shape and that and is never equal to itself – a thing which I think is the most shameful quality. Trust me, it is a prize role, to play the part of a single person. But there’s no one who can be only one person except the wise one. The rest of us frequently change our shapes.”

Klein: Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all.

A few things had been annoying me about Edith Grossman’s Don Quixote translation — unnecessary footnotes, and her translations of Sancho’s malapropisms, which would strike me as a little cute — and after the latest instance of the latter, having recourse to my revised Ormsby in the Norton edition, I tried that out, and at once preferred the reading experience.

Perhaps the first thing that struck me as inapt about the Grossman translation was her rendering of Knight of The Mournful Face where Ormsby has Knight of The Mournful Countenance. I don’t know which is the more accurate but “countenance” seems much better to participate in the grandiloquence of knight errantry.

Here is wiki on her translation’s reception.

Great Yglesias piece: “National” conservatism is un-American

This is an important debate. Where Yglesias and Ezra agree is that something needs to be different this time around about how and whether Democrats cooperate with Republicans to keep the government funded, though Klein seems to lean toward, and Yglesias against, threatening to let the government to shut down.

(Ad endum: Yglesias clarifies in a later tweet that whether or not to let the government shut down is, as it were, the more fun question for Democrats; while the more difficult question, more meaningful question for Democrats is, how do they win the senate?)