reposting from tumblr

Some Notes On Reading Don Quixote

Every man thinking of starting a blog would do well to begin by reading Don Quixote, and this for several reasons.

In the first place, it is a Damn Big Book, and this endeavor will therefore be a godsend to procrastinators. (If you really wanted to get on with your life, would you be blogging?)

By the same token, you may be assured that few visitors will have read the book themselves, which is also to your advantage, as the prime purpose of the web is to let its users claim acquaintanceship with things & people they couldn’t be bothered to understand. (This applies equally to on-line news magazines, wikipedia, facebook, and porn sites.)

Next, though I am no great student of literature, it seems to me one of the earliest metafictions, a book written in violent reaction to a satiety of other people’s writings, in this case the chivalric romances that seem to have been the pulp fiction of Cervantes’ age.

That doesn’t quite make it a proto-blog, but once you take into account the episodic structure and the publication by installments, you’re definitely in the right ball park, and there are few things more conducive to the proper valuation of modern technology than seeing how well we got on without it 400 years ago.

You may also think it relevant in that the blogging enterprise is itself Quixotic (“Of a person: visionary; naively idealistic; enthusiastically and actively chivalrous or romantic; impractical.” according to my Shorter OED).

Oh, que nenni, as the French say. (Hell no, in the inevitably less elegant English.)

The real point, of course, is that DQ was mad. Not lovably loopy, but an obdurately and cringe-makingly delusional thug. (Why then the OED’s definition? Because no one’s actually read the book. The reason the windmill episode is the best known of his adventures is that it occurs at the start.)
And this, then, is what each blogger should ask himself as he posts:  Am I a new Cervantes, or just another Quixote?