Friends don’t let friends endure terrible typography. I often link to long articles and other works. If you are reading online, I strongly recommend the application of some design magic. The Readability bookmarklets make this a one-click option, as does Clippable and Evernote’s clearly. Instapaper does this automatically along with a jillion other things for readers on the web or Kindle, as does Klip.me.

WORK

In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him. […] his greatest favourite was Reynald of Montalban, most of all when he saw him sallying forth from his castle and plundering all those he met, and when in foreign parts he stole that image of Muhammad made of solid gold, as his history records. He’d have given his housekeeper, and even his niece into the bargain, to trample the traitor Ganelon in the dust.

And so, by now quite insane, he conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honour and for the common good, to become a knight errant, and to travel about the world with his armour and his arms and his horse in search of adventures, and to practise all those activities that he knew from his books were practised by knights errant, redressing all kinds of grievances, and exposing himself to perils and dangers that he would overcome and thus gain eternal fame and renown.

—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
—from Don Quixote (translated by John Rutherford)

WORD(S)

oeillade. noun. To glance with a meaningful, usually amorous look, to ogle. From Middle French, French œillade glance, especially a secret glance as a sign of affection.

“REGAN:
She gave strange oeillades and most speaking looks
To noble Edmund. I know you are of her bosom.” (Shakespeare)

“FALSTAFF:
I have writ me here a letter to her: and here
another to Page’s wife, who even now gave me good
eyes too, examined my parts with most judicious
oeillades; sometimes the beam of her view gilded my
foot, sometimes my portly belly.” (Shakespeare)

“My devotions proceed no farther than a forenoon’s walk, a sentimental conversation, now and then a squeeze of the hand or interchanging an oeillade.” (Robert Burns)

WEB

1. Cremation Solutions has a lot of answers to needs you might not yet know you have, including: Cremation Urn Hero Figures, Funeral Celebrant ghostwriting, Birdhouse urns, full-sized head figurine urns and Cremation Companion Crystals.

2. I was gratified that more than one reader noticed the quality of the Prufrock reading by “Tom O’Bedlam.” Indeed, the mysterious, golden-voiced O’Bedlam has recorded well over 1000 poems by poets classic and modern.

3. “Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Love to Write”. And all those people are spending time running marathons and stuff.

4. If picking up Don Quixote is too much, how about Jorge Luis Borges’ ingenious, mind-bending little story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”? Don’t take my word for it…Douglas Adams wrote, “You should read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. It’s only six pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you.”

5. Today in 1547, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote (full title: The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quijote of La Mancha), a send-up of the chivalric romances popular at the time, is born. One doesn’t have to read that most famous work to know the image of tilting at windmills or the phrase coined therein that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Don Quixote is, arguably, the first modern novel and, even more arguably, Cervantes’s genius was rivaled only by Shakespeare’s (who, incidentally, wrote a now-lost play, The History of Cardenio based on a character in Don Quixote). It is a funny novel that everyone should read at least once.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader F. is of the blessèd ones. She writes, beautifully: “Since the day I sat on a small cot at Bread Loaf in 1966 reading, for the first time, every single one of Stevens’ poems in the then collected works without stopping for lunch, for drinks, for dinner, hardly registering the fact that my partner, who was studying Stevens with Harold Bloom, came in and left to take the afghan hounds for the walk that I usually took through the blueberry patch, ever since that day, I have recognized the mind behind the words, the words behind the mind, the fire at the end of the palm. There are other poets I know and love, but there are no other poets who have become part of my blood and bone as Stevens has. So, when you ask, how many of us can really claim to know many of Stevens’ poems, I have to say, here, here. I open his book like an I Ching and the right phrase to title the workshop I am giving or the paper I am writing is before me. Is within me.”

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