My Life and Thoughts

The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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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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