Evanston: on being too original; a new DON QUIXOTE;
sails
Evanston: on being too original; a new DON QUIXOTE;
sails
“I’ve never seen that before.”
“Neither have I.”
Not exactly what you want to hear when medical specialists are hovering over your body; but I did yesterday during a follow up appointment with my most recent eye surgeon.
Precisely what neither doctor had ever seen before is not clear. Neither, of course, is my eye. It was couched in medical terms. The eye is not troubling me, but apparently is falling apart in novel ways and still may be a source of grief.
While I lobbied to have it enucleated early this year, I no longer have time.
Eye and I are in this together.
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Over what is now a long lifetime, I have at least started to read almost all the classic books in Western literature, and finished most of them.
There are exceptions.
I’ve never finished James Joyce’s ULYSSES in attempts decades apart, despite its having two great lines in the first hundred pages: History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. And, God is a shout in the street.
I’ve never finished even the first of the seven volumes of Proust’s REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.
And, although I have finished it, I’ve never really liked Goethe’s FAUST, which I blame on bad translations.
The same has been true of Cervantes’s DON QUIXOTE, but may be no longer.
I recently came across a translation by Edith Grossman, first published ten years ago and highly praised by the late Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, which makes me think it must be true to the original. Thus far it has proven to be enjoyably readable. I’m only 15% of the way through the Kindle edition, but that’s farther than I’ve ever gotten before and I’m not bogged down. Maybe this will be the mad knight’s year.
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If you’ve been following SCOUT (see the preceding entry), you’ve seen it making a scalloping track in the Atlantic. On the Facebook page, this is attributed to a bug in programming.
With a limited budget and a lot of their own labor and time, these young people are trying to do something that has never been done before, but will, I expect, become commonplace in the not too distant future. For now I would not rate their chances of complete success highly. SCOUT is, after all, a power boat.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2013