MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

When we were in Barcelona, I gave my traveling companion another chance to prove what a good sport he is, by dragging him on a day trip to the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat. Here, one day in the sixteenth century, St. Ignatius of Loyola almost threw himself into a hole in his room, because of his inability to stop writing his spiritual confessions. This was an important moment in the history of graphomania.
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From early February to mid-May, 2007, I suffered from a delusion that I would be unable to complete my dissertation until I read the 6-volume commentary to Don Quijote by Diego Clemencín, a 19th-century scholar whose annotations are based on his experiences attempting to read every single chivalric romance known to Cervantes. This took him so long that he actually died. The commentary was published posthumously by his sons.

I don’t know why I thought it was necessary for me to study the failed chivalric romances that Cervantes was parodying. Definitely, nobody told me to do it. It took a really long time, and so far has yielded two concrete gains:

1. I got better at reading Spanish.
2. While flipping through a library copy of Tirant lo blanc, a little-known Catalan romance mentioned in Don Quijote, I found a $100 bill.

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In September, I finally filed my dissertation in the Stanford department of comparative literature. The dissertation is called “The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel” and is full of just the kind of big ideas you would expect, on subjects including graphomania and the professionalization of the writer. Texts discussed include: Don Quijote, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Anna Karenina, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

You can read the first chapter here; there is a relatively low-theory summary here. Acknowledgements junkies may click here.

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