Kernel Mustard

I’m listening to Jorge Luis Borges’s excellent Harvard lecture series This Craft of Verse this week. It’s really fantastic; his was a great intelligence, and he was extremely well read.

One thing he said really struck me. About midway through his first lecture, he commented on the title of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de La Manca, saying that the title was intended to be a little bit silly. He said that it would be similar to a modern American writer saying something like Don Quixote of Kansas City.

Now, I live in Kansas City, so I can relate to what Borges is saying here. I just didn’t think anyone really cared about Kansas City enough to make fun of it. It’s good to know that my hometown provides amusement for even the most elite intellectuals. And, this helps to settle a long-running debate between my wife and me.

On a related note, I read Don Quixote recently, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s brilliant. The amazing part is remembering that it was first published in 1605; Shakespeare was still active then and it’s over two centuries before Jane Austen’s first novel.

Anyway, thanks, Jorge!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.