Two Books

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A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Aug 8, 2014 at 6:28pm PDT

            Two books, very different.  Though both were crafted replies to other writers.
            The first — first in chronology as well as psychic weight — is Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure.  This is my first book of poetry, and it was released by Seattle's Babel/Salvage at the end of August.  Beltenebros is a (short) book-length poem.  It was written in direct response to Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha; I think of it as sort of "talking back" (albeit with a great deal of affection) to the novel(s).*

The book finally got finished! #papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:10pm PST

            The second, though it got finished around the same time, is quite different.  It is a very small, handmade object.  Each page contains "memorabilia" from either Lemuel Gulliver's journeys in Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel, or from my own journeys, or some of each.  It took much longer than I'd expected, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out.  There are a couple of pictures in this post, but if you click through to my Instagram account, you can find images of all the pages.

                    _______________________________________________________


            I wish I could remember more clearly.  Like most children, I did various art projects when I was little.  And I'm sure that, also like other children, some of my experiments prompted my mother and other grown-ups to say, with a mix of pride and puzzlement, "What is it?"
            I wish I could remember exactly how I felt about that question.  I suspect it doesn't bother kids as much as most adults worry it does.  I vaguely remember feeling pleasure.  Not because of their interest, but because, in realizing the adult didn't recognize what my picture was an image of, I could tell them whatever I wanted.  A dog could suddenly be claimed as a giraffe.  A tree could become a boat.
            I like the adult version much less.  Now people say, "What is it about?"
            In the last few months, each time I have told a person that my first book was published, or that I made a handmade book/art-ish object, I have heard the question, "What is it about?"
            I can think of two appropriate responses.  I could launch into a long analysis of all of the themes and shapes and recurring images and all the layered meanings in Beltenebros.  I could talk about memory and materialism and my highly clichéd but nonetheless thriving romance with the sea in the Gulliver's Travels book.  That's one way of responding that seems as least reasonable.
            Or I could shrug my shoulders and say, "I have no idea."  This seems most honest.
            But I am just as socially assimilated as the next schmuck, so I politely say something like, "It's an homage to Don Quixote/Gulliver's Travels."  Blatant relief sweeps across their face as they realize A) it's not sexual, and B) the fact that it is "about" books they haven't read lets them off the hook from having to feign interest.  They (equally politely) reply, "Oh, I haven't read it."

#papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:15pm PST

            The reason I think all of this matters is simple:  I caught myself.  I caught myself being more proud of having had Beltenebros published than I was of finishing the handmade book.  And if I dig under that pride a bit, I realize that my pride in having a book published stems from a sense of validation.  Having someone — anyone — choose your poem or novel or essay collection to send off to a printer's and slap an ISBN on it feels like "someone" — that conveniently vague notion of the rational capitalist at the back of everything — has put their stamp of approval on my work.  Receiving that stamp of approval permits others to grant theirs as well.
            But...really???  Have you seen some of the  books to get published recently?  I know I'm showing some of my elitist colors here, but "getting published" (and the passivity of that phrase should probably bug you) says nothing of the artistic value of a, um...book.  What it tells you is something about its capitalist value; that Babel/Salvage and many, many publishing houses like it are so clearly labors of love, doesn't change that fact.
            For the time being, I'm not going after this so much as an attack on capitalism "out there," so to speak, as I am concerned about the ways capitalism and consumerism have clearly shaped my own mind.  I care deeply about human creativity, and any ideology that fucks with the underlying structures of our individual minds and the consciousness of our larger societies to such an extent that we value the approval of the market more highly than our own inner compass should disturb me.  It should disturb me often enough to actually do something about it.  Maybe I could start with being proud of having written the damned thing.

                    _______________________________________________________


            As I mentioned in my last post, the move to Portland has been tumultuous, and I can't currently locate my copy of Don Q.  But in the next couple of weeks I should be able to put up a couple of posts that show some of what I did in working with Cervantes' text.  If you're curious, you can search for "quixote" in the upper left-hand corner to see a couple of short excerpts, as well as some of my thoughts on the novel and my process in general.
            As always, feel free to comment, and thanks for the patience in my transition to Portlandia!



* Today if you go to your local bookstore (my favorites being Elliott Bay in Seattle and Portland's Powell's on Hawthorne), you will find the single book Don Quixote de la Mancha.  I only think it worth mentioning that it was actually two separate books written by Cervantes because the two are quite different, and writing the second book probably contributed to Cervantes' decline in health.  He worked his ass off to get the book out partially because so many copycats had published spurious second volumes to his original, and he wanted to set the records straight.

Next Big Thing Interview

            I'm very happy to say that I get to do something totally different than usual today.  My friend Graham Isaac just released his first grown-up book (with an ISBN and everything!) Filthy Jerry's Guide to Parking Lots with Babel/Salvage, and subsequently tagged me in the Next Big Thing interview, wherein I answer some questions about upcoming projects and subsequently tag other folks.
            And so, without further ado, I will...um, interview myself, I guess.

            What is the working title of your next manuscript?

            Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure.

            Where did the idea come from for the book?

            Some time in 2011 I started reading Don Quixote, by Cervantes.  And by reading, I mean inching through very slowly.  I was taking tons of notes, but I didn't have any plans to write anything in response.  It's a classic, it was on my "must read these classic novels before I die" list, so I just took my time and enjoyed getting pulled into Don Quixote and Sancho Panza's characters and interactions.  Somewhere along the line a little phrase came to me, and I jotted it in my journal; not a huge thing, since that happens all the time and I don't use 99% of the snippets.  But somehow I knew the snippet had to do with Quixote.  I wasn't sure how, and that snippet didn't make it to the final cut, but I started getting more and more poetic responses to the text and kept noting them down until I realized I had a project on my hands.

            What genre does your book fall under?

            I'm thinking of it as a small-book-length poem, but there are prose sections as well.  I guess there are three types of writing:  really abstract poetry; a couple lyric pieces; and several imaginary letters written between characters in the novel.

            What actors would you choose to play the parts of your characters in a movie rendition?

            I'm ignoring the problem of time and saying Charlie Chaplin should be Don Q and Robin Williams should play Sancho Panza.  Or you could probably just reverse them.  You could make it super artsy and have them keep switching back and forth who was playing whom.  That is, if Sir Charlie hadn't been driven to an untimely death by the Patriot Act.  I mean, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

            What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

            While moving between heavily abstracted night scenes and imaginary battles, and more narrative sections of letters and lyric poetry, some of the themes of the novel Don Quixote are teased out:  dreaming, insanity, playing with gender, and the idealization of "the lady."  (That's an ugly sentence.  Why did I have to get it all into one?)

            How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

            That's hard to say.  I count the reading of the novel as part of the time, because I did start generating some of the material then.  So if I counted reading and writing, one year.  If just writing, about six months.

            Who or what inspired you to write this book?

            Signor Quixote.  Sancho Panza.  Dulcinea del Toboso.  And Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and Tobias Smollett, whose translation I used.  The piece is as much an homage to Smollett's translation as it is to the novel itself.  It's spectacularly funny, especially if you have any kind of a Shakespeare background.

            What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

            Well, my concerns tend to center around beauty, and whether such a thing is possible in the modern world; and knowing reality versus believing a dream/madness.  Also, again, the whole lady love thing.  I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of courtly and idealized love, probably because it's produced some damn good work.  But there are problems there, of course, especially since I'm a woman.  So probably people who are interested in those same issues would be interested in the book.

            Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

            My book will be published by none other than the aforementioned Babel/Salvage!

            My tagged writers are...

            John Opsand Sutherland and Evan J. Peterson.

Adios, Signor Quixote

            I believe I read somewhere that there are two different kinds of fairy tales.  I'm sure there are far more than that, but the two types serve my purpose well here.
            Often people flippantly say that all fairy tales are morality tales, but that is patently not true.  The only moral to be gained from Jack and the Beanstalk is that it's a good idea to break into the houses of people who are infinitely stronger than you are.  The only moral to the Frog Prince is that you will be rewarded for being a little bitch.  You could sarcastically argue that these morals are actually true, but these stories were not told to children to make them good.  Like religious stories, fairy tales are told from a certain perspective from which you will read certain characters as protagonists; this does not make them good in the sense that most parents wish their children might occasionally be.
            So there are morality tales ("Steal and God will strike you dead"), and there are the more complicated stories, which I might call metaphorical tales.  The kinds of stories where we give the listening child a character to identify with, and then guide them through a story which will, we hope, help equip them to deal with the complexities of childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
            I swear this relates to the ending of Don Quixote.  Just give me a minute.
            Don Quixote is defeated.  He is defeated in a fair fight, and the consequence of his defeat is that he is sworn to return to La Mancha to spend a year in retreat from the life of a knight-errant.  Defeat, and its subsequent enforced sedentary life, breaks Don Quixote.  What's more, he begins to see things are they really are: pigs are not an army, but simple pigs; an inn is no longer a castle, but a humble inn.
            However, on their way home, he begins a new scheme.  He plans for Sancho and himself, and hopefully also the barber and the curate, to embark upon a life pastoral.  In other words, he has decided to take up another literary-allusion-as-guiding-life-principle.  They will be shepherds, roaming the fields and woods, and pining after their assorted lady loves.  Quixote will become Quixotiz, and Sancho will become Pancino, lover of "Teresona, which will fit her fatness to an hair, as well as be agreeable to her own name Teresa," (Ibid., p. 1047).  Quixote tells his friends the curate and the batchelor (student) Sampson Carrasco of his plans, and they, lost in the face of this new species of madness, go along with it.  Thus far, though he is sad, and though he is seeing things as they are, we still clearly have an imaginative man before us.
            But then suddenly, Don Quixote develops a fever.  He remains in bed for six days.  A physician is called, and he foresees the worst.  Quixote falls asleep shortly after the doctor has come.  Waking, he announces, "I now enjoy my judgment undisturbed, and cleared from those dark shadows of ignorance, in which my understanding hath been involved, by the pernicious and incessant reading of those detestable books of chivalry.  I am now sensible of the falsity and folly they contain," (Ibid., p. 1085).
            To be clear, I'm sort of belligerently devoted to reality, so Quixote is no hero of mine.  I don't doubt that Quixote was insane.  I also think he was a bit of a jerk sometimes, and it often felt as though he consciously knew what he was doing, and how ill-suited his actions were to reality.
            What bothers me here is that it feels like a placation of the audience.  Like a movie or an opera where the bad guy has been so well-developed, and so intelligent, and pointed out so many flaws in, oh, I don't know, maybe a political/economic system, that his or her death in the end feels like the wrong kind of fairy tale.
            Up until the end, I feel like I've been reading the weird, wobbly-ethical-lines kind of fairy tale: how can the Sleeping Beauty fulfill fate only by disobeying those she is supposed to submit to, those who are sworn to protect her from, um, fulfilling her fate?  How can it be right for Don Quixote to wreak havoc at Juan Palomeque's inn, destroying his property and ruining his wine in an effort to vanquish a monster?  And more pointedly, how can it be right for it to be necessary to the story for him to do this?  For it is necessary.  Necessary for many reasons, not the least of which is bringing one Don Fernando to his senses enough that he chooses to honor his marriage to Dorothea (long story).
            And now Cervantes has decided to wrap things up into a different kind of fairy tale.  Now Don Quixote is dying, and he willingly denounces all the weirdness, all the insanity, all the interest.  Suddenly, he denounces the very reason we are reading his story and declares his books to be detestable.  Does that make this book detestable, at least in his eyes?
            I suppose the complicating factor here is the question of which comes first: the immanence of the knight's death, or his return to sanity?  Does one cause the other?  Or do they arise simultaneously, necessarily part of the same event: the transformation of Don Quixote back into Alonso Quixano?

overtaken by the morning

In the longer Quixote piece, there were several of these smaller bits, which I thought of as something like "those messed up abstract night sections." Messed up because, unlike the following one, most had copious quantities of footnotes. I chose this one because for whatever reason Copy/Cut/Paste doesn't seem to work with footnotes, and the task was too daunting to recreate them for one of the weirder sections.

overtaken by the morning*

at twilight night begins at twilight.

such beautiful terror all this

beautiful.

day’s dust settles in a thicket not far

not far from a great and shadowy building looms

not far from twilight

such beautiful twilight.

not there yet in a thicket

of oaks not far from the gate in a thicket

night is pulled on its course by the old

alonso quixano

resting in some thicket

of oaks listening to barking dogs cats mewing of

resting in some thicket of oaks young,

plump man, eyes exhausted by day’s light, on a donkey

stars and day’s dust.

from the gates, not far from shadowy thickets of

thickets of oak trees a moon a man

a moon, exhausted by the day’s light

the building that casts the shadow

where where is it?

the palace dogs, dogs barking

toboso.

that great shadowy tree.

where is the palace of dulcinea?

that great shadowy ¿where? toboso, yes!  but

toboso, silent, and lying

with outstretched legs

eyes , exhausted by the day’s light watch.

where is the palace of dulcinea? 

far far from the gate far

from the thicket that great and shadowy building

that great embowery building casts the shadow.

and sancho

the plump

ventures forth on his donkey

passes oak trees

and gates

hears the barking of dogs and grunting of hogs

sancho pulls the moon across the sky

    draws the moon along its course

  while the night’s dust

cools, and settles.

* Ibid., p. 614.

people sometimes go in quest of one thing, and meet with another

As some readers might know, I've been slowly working through my own creative response to Don Quixote for quite some time.  It's technically in the revision stages, so I wouldn't call the little bits I'll share here finished.  But I wouldn't be sharing all of my thoughts on a literary work if I didn't share some of my more "poety" thoughts.

The following is an imaginary letter from Sancho, Don Quixote's squire, to Dapple the donkey.

people sometimes go in quest of one thing, and meet with another*

SANCHO PANZA’S SECOND LETTER TO DAPPLE, A NOBLE AND INTELLIGENT ANIMAL

            Having given more time to considering the matter of the history of our adventures, I found I was puzzled by certain matters which seem to occur in the book differently than I remember, and others which I was shocked to discover any person could have known of.  In the first instance was, your very own abduction by Gines de Passamonte.  For either Cid Hamet Benengeli, or Signor Cervantes Saavedra (or perhaps the English-man*** Mister Smollett) has mistakenly depicted you as having mysteriously re-appeared, before you were joyfully retrieved from Passamonte, the scoundrel.
            With regard to those accounts which I would have thought the author ignorant, there is the most strange matter of the loss of our history, and its retrieval at the exchange of Toledo.  I do not understand how the first part of our exploits came to be known at all.  For, as there was no one present to record the assailment of the innocent wind-mills, the incident of the Benedictine fryars, and the auspicious sally of the sage Don Quixote, upon the Castle of the Innkeeper, together with its damsels—I say, I do not comprehend how these things came to be known if Signor Cervantes (or Cid Hamet Benengeli, or again Mister Smollett) only found the history, as it commenced after these extraordinary adventures.
            And finally, there is the occasion of my own entry into the history, along with your own most valorant self, precisely at Volume One, Book One, Chapter Seven, page eighty and five.  For how could anyone have known that we did in fact list ourselves as Don Quixote’s servants, at that very moment, as no one but our selves was there!  I might almost believe you to have spoken to Signor Cervantes, if I did not know you to be a donkey who keeps his own counsel.
            Altogether I find the explanation of our travels to be almost more confusing than the traveling of them.  I find cause here to rejoice at my own inability to read, or to write, and leave such confusions and obfuscisions to the perusal of such men as the clerk who records this letter for your perusal.

Your humble master and friend,

Sancho Panza

*  de Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel.  The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote.  Trans. Tobias Smollett.  New York:  Modern Library, 2001.  Print, page 150.  No, no, that's not right.  Page 367.**

**  Sorry.  I was right the first time.  Page 150. 

***  Sancho here makes a slight error as to the nationality of the translator.  Tobias Smollett was in fact a Scottsman, and not an Englishman.

darkness visible: an homage to a phrase, and the art of translation

            I'm guessing that I'm not the only writer who feels this way, but I like to imagine that words and language have a sort of life and intelligence of their own.  That words contemplate, breed, die, ache, and chat over tea (or scream recriminations at one another).

            Darkness visible.
            Beautiful phrase, even though (or because?) it refuses to articulate its meaning on casual encounter.

            In the midst of this and other such savoury conversation, they quitted the tent, to examine some snares they had laid; in which amusement the day soon elapsed, and was succeeded by the night, which did not appear so serene and composed as it might have been expected at that season of the year, which was midsummer, but along with it came a certain darkness visible, which greatly assisted the design of the duke and dutchess.  (Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Tobias Smollett.  Modern Library 2001 edition, p. 809.)

            I first met the words in the 1989 memoir by William Styron.  Darkness Visible: a Memoir of Madness.  In the book, Styron carefully and hideously details his descent into depression, and what he found lurking in the pit.
            Strange to meet the phrase in a 17th century Spanish novel.  For a moment, I wondered if it had come into English from Spanish, through the Quixote.
            But then I remembered, some long-ago-learned detail:  the phrase "darkness visible" entered the English language with Milton.  Note that in the following quote, the "he" is Satan:

            At once as far as Angel's ken he views
            The dismal Situation waste and wild,
            A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
            As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
            No light, but rather darkness visible
            Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,
            Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
            And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
            That comes to all; but torture without end
            Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
            With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd.  (Paradise Lost, John Milton.  Book I, lines 59-69)

            But Milton's poem was published in 1667, over fifty years after the second half of the Quixote.
            Enter the translator, Tobias Smollett.
            It suddenly dawned on me that Smollett, translating Cervantes' novel almost 150 years after it was published in Spanish, and nearly 100 years after Milton's poem, chose this phrase as his translation of an entirely different phrase in Spanish (would that I could read Spanish and locate that phrase).  In his book Is that a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos states, "all utterances have innumerably acceptable translations."  This of course does not mean that any translation of a given utterance is acceptable, but it does mean that the ways an "utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation."
            In the scene following, Don Quixote and Sancho meet "Merlin," as well as several other "inchanters," and a Dulcinea who is actually a young, attractive man in drag.  All being pulled along on a cart by oxen with candles made to look as though they are growing out of their horns.  It strikes me that the Pythons might have read Cervantes.
            If words have a life and intelligence of their own, then I think here Smollett's words are undoubtedly poking at Milton's, and saying something along the lines of, "Hey!  Don't take yourself so seriously!"  

Inns and Castles

            Among other confusions, Don Quixote is prone to view inns as castles.  One night, at one particular such...er, resting-place/noble abode, four men on horseback arrive and ask for entrance.  Don Quixote (fairly justifiably) points out that it is ridiculously early and they should stop making a ruckus at such an ungodly hour and wait for the king to wake up.  They object to the notion of royalty residing in said building, one of them declaring that "in such a sorry inn, without any sort of noise or stir, I cannot believe that any persons of such note would lodge."
            "You know little of the world, replied Don Quixote, since you are so ignorant of the events that happen in knight-errantry."
            Quixote has many such comical "fall-backs" as it were.  Here, as in other places, he responds to others questioning his interpretation of a situation by attributing the conflict in views to the ignorance of others.  I.e., I have read more than you, and therefore understand this situation far better.  An expedient I have known more than one professor (or pseudo-intellectual such as myself) to fall upon.  But aside from these diversions, this scene starts to get at my ambivalence towards Quixote.
            The part of me that is all nostalgia — the part of me that gets completely nailed by Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris — can't help but sympathize with Don Quixote.  I am always wanting a different time and place, and I chafe at the texture of the world I find myself in.  Quixote has decided to do away with the chafing altogether, and somehow change reality, insofar as he is able through a movement of consciousness.  But this, I think, is where I begin to feel a slight disgust at the apparently logical conclusion of my own nostalgia.
            I cannot countenance such a denial of reality.  When I was younger, I would have found it romantic.  I was insecure enough to want art and religion to manipulate reality, to make it into something less frightening and less painful than it is.
            But now, even if the reality is that life is ambiguous and unsatisfactory, frightening and painful, and, God, so humiliating...even then, I would like to face up to it with some honesty, and to hopefully not cause anyone else pain while doing so.
            I know this is idealistic, in a sense, and probably sounds very proud and self-righteous.  Also, it is easier said than done.  But I spent most of the book not liking Don Quixote.  I felt about him the way one might feel about a friend, whom one loves, but doesn't really trust to have any common sense.
            But how can I say I didn't like Don Quixote, when I absolutely adore Don Quixote?  There is no book without the star-gazing madman.
            Before I read the book, I had him romanticized into a hero of my own rose-colored glasses tribe.  But having read the book, and seen the fallout of his actions and misguided violence, my feelings changed considerably.  There was the initial revulsion, of course, followed by the adolescent's "I'm not going to be like that anymore!"  Which mellowed into something weirder and more complicated.   (That last sentence seems to be the theme of my thirties so far.)
            I can't help wondering how Quixote is viewed by people who know him through the book, versus those who know him by reputation only.  For those who haven't read the book, is he a figure of nostalgic heroism?  Or of pity?  Something else?  And for those who have read it, was there a change in your view of him? 

The Quixote

            Having successfully mangled my foot to such a degree that I can't work for the next week, I find that I have plenty of time to write some posts for my new blog.  Since I'm always complaining that I don't have enough time to read and write, I suppose I should be grateful?
            Yes.  Gratitude is the perspective I'll try to take.
            Well, amongst other reading, I am slowly - so, so slowly - reading through the classics.  The first on my list was Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and it took me a mere six months to get through it.
            I shouldn't complain about the pace too much, though.  I was afraid I'd lost the patience for slow reading, and I loved every square inch of that book.  I'm going to sort of assume readers know the general premise of the book - man goes mad, decides to become a knight-errant, and embarks on all sorts of misconstrued adventures - but here are a couple of details I myself didn't know beforehand that I found very helpful.
            First of all, I had no idea that it was in fact books and reading itself which drove the man crazy.  (Incidentally, his real name is Alonso Quixano; Don Quixote is a name he gives himself.)  Books are a huge topic throughout the novel, and it is far more "meta" than much more modern literature:  "As for Don Quixote, he leaned against a beech or cork tree; for, Cid Hamet Benengeli [our supposed narrator] has not distinguished the genus," (p. 1052, Modern Library, 2001 paperback edition).  Books, their narrations and unreliabilities, are at the center of Quixote's madness.
            The second detail I hadn't realized was that knight-errantry was already quite old-fashioned by the time Quixano decided to join its gallant ranks.  Somehow Cervantes' Spain, being chronologically closer to the time of knights-errant, seemed also culturally closer.  But in fact, the knights-errant were already a thing of the past, and largely a thing of fantasy novels.
            It's a long book.  Mine is just over 1,000 pages.  But I really, really wish I could get everyone I know to read it.  It was such a reading pleasure, and far easier to get through (and funnier!) than I'd expected.  I got lost in it, and it sort of became part of my life, the way books did when I was a kid.  The way Elizabeth Bennett, and Lucy and Aslan, and Juliet Capulet became friends when I read about them.  I'm not sure why some books are able to do this, and others remain simply stories, but Quixote and Sancho feel like old friends now; and for that (as well as my broken/sliced-up foot), I'm grateful.