On turning 65

Yesterday was my birthday, and I decided to spoil myself by visiting my favorite restaurant-Bahia de Guaymas for lunch. I got to enjoy the perfect meal for a hot July day: tostada de ceviche de camaron.
This dish has a mound of shrimp ceviche on a toasted corn tortilla with a garnish of avocado. This wonderful food is prepared with fresh shrimp, crispy chile peppers and other veggies as well as lemon or lime juice. This chilly and citrusy delight is the perfect meal on a hot July afternoon in Phoenix. Ceviche always reminds me of eating kelaguen on Guam and yom gung in Thailand. The three dishes are similarly prepared. The shrimp ceviche as well as the fish ceviche at this restaurant is the best in town.
As always, the service was great. Everyone at Bahia de Guaymas restaurant are always friendly and nice. Alma, my dear friend for two decades now, was my waitress. Knowing what day it was, she put Vicente Fernandez singing "Las Mananitas" on the juke box. The owner doña Anita, who is a long-time friend as well, also wished me a "Happy Birthday." It was a wonderful afternoon for an old man on his birthday.

Early this morning was a glorious event. Rainy mornings in July is a rare and remarkable event here in Phoenix, but that's what I woke up to today. The light at dawn poured in under the  the cloud cover and filled the Valley of the Sun with a golden almost celestial light. At the same time, there was a beautiful and bright rainbow in the west.  It was wonderful to walk around in sprinkling rain and witness the light around me.

Temprano esta mañana fue un evento glorioso. Mañanas de lluvia en julio es un evento raro y notable aquí en Phoenix, pero eso es lo que me desperté al día de hoy. La luz en el amanecer vierte en virtud de la cobertura de nubes y llenó el Valle del Sol con una luz casi celestial de oro. Al mismo tiempo, había un arco iris hermoso y brillante en el oeste. Fue maravilloso para pasear por aspersión lluvia y ser testigo de la luz a mi alrededor.

The following is a short list of writers and their works that were influenced by Cervantes and his novel Don Quixote. For the most part this list is from the book Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote (1990) by Anthony Close. The rest are my selections based on Dr. Closes criterion. Those titles that are not novels are noted. Any suggestions?

Samuel Butler - Hudibras, 1684 (poem)

Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews, 1742

Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy, 1759

Stendhal - The Red and the Black, 1830

Charles Dickens- Pickwick Papers, 1837

Stendhal- The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839

Edgar Allen Poe - Eldorado, 1849 (poem)

Herman Melville - Moby Dick, 1853

Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, 1856

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot, 1868

George Elliot - Middlemarch, 1871

Leopoldo Alas - The Regentess, 1884

Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885

Benito Perez Galdos- Doña Perfecta, 1876

Benito Perez Galdos -Fortunata and Jacinta, 1886–87 

Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac, 1897 (play)

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness, 1899

Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim, 1900

Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks, 1901

Henry James - The Ambassadors, 1903

Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Svejk, 1921

James Joyce - Ulysses, 1922

Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby, 1925

Andre Gide - The Counterfeiters, 1926

Franz Kafka - The Castle, 1926

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms, 1929

Miguel de Unamuno - St Manuel Bueno, Martyr, 1931

Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones, 1944

Jorge Luis Borges - El Aleph, 1949

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita, 1958

Luis Martin Santos - Time of Silence, 1961

Ken Kesey - One few Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire, 1962

Carlos Fuentes - Change of Skin, 1967

Graham Greene - Monsignor Quixote, 1982

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985

On Being Quixotic and Having Panache

My friend the very talented artist, calligrapher and illustrator Valle Camacho Matute recently opened an exhibition in Logroño, Spain. The show is called La Segunda Parte, and in it  her wonderful artwork celebrates the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second part of the great novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.It's an outstanding exposition that has inspired me to reread the wonderful story of don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza, and it got me to thinking about my relationship with the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha.

I think for most of my generation learned about Don Quixote after the premiere of that great Broadway musical The Man from La Mancha. When Richard Kiley sang Joe Darion's lyrics to The Impossible Dream by it made him a Broadway star and it define who Don Quixote was, his quest, and what it was to be quixotic.

To dream the impossible dream

To fight the unbeatable foe

To bear with unbearable sorrow

To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong

To love pure and chaste from afar

To try when your arms are too weary

To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest

To follow that star

No matter how hopeless

No matter how far

To fight for the right

Without question or pause

To be willing to march into Hell

For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true

To this glorious quest

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this

That one man, scorned and covered with scars

Still strove with his last ounce of courage

To reach the unreachable star

I, however, already sort of knew about Don Quixote and his quest. A few years before my dad had purchased a set of 45s recording of the great speeches from 1950 movie of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play "Cyrano de Bergerac." The actor who played heroic large-nosed swordsman in this 'heroic comedy' was played José Ferrer who coincidentally would take over for Richard Kiley on the Broadway production of The Man from La Mancha. 

Ferrar was great portraying the panache of Cyrano-especially when in Act One. There his panache is quickly demonstrated when he rebuffs an insult by saying the different and more clever ways the insult could have been delivered. Then during the sword fight with his antagonist that follows, Cyrano creates a ballad which consists of three verses of eight lines each and a two line coda. As they duel, he ends each verse with the words "at the coda's end_I hit!" At the coda's end, the swordsman and poet strikes home and kills his opponent.

Later in Act Two, Cyrano talks about Don Quixote in the following exchange with his powerful enemy the Comte de Guiche:

DE QUICHE [controlled, smiling]: Have you ever read "Don Quixote?"
CYRANO: With great delight. I take my hat off to that old fly-by-night.
DE QUICHE: I suggest you study. . .I mean the passage about the windmills.
CYRANO: Chapter Thirteen.
DE QUICHE: When you make war on windmills you may find---
CYRANO: I'm tilting at men who veer with every wind?
DE QUICHE: That those mill-sails will thrash their mighty spars and throw you in the mud.
CYRANO: Or up among the stars!

Even though the story of the windmills is in Chapter Eight and not Thirteen, Rostand's Cyrano truly understands Don Quixote and his gallant quest. When he calls the novel "that old fly-by-night," he is sharing in the audience's familiarity with the classic as well. According to Cambridge scholar Anthony Close, Cervantes' hero was well known to educated readers and theatergoers of the 19th century. In fact, the quixote hero was something of a type of character, and the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha is the "father to some unexpected offspring, among them Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), the hero of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868), Maxi in Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta (1887)---and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac."

As I think about it now, I didn't first meet Don Quixote through the portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac, but through through another character in an 1849 poem by Edgar Allen Poe entitled Eldorado. I first read in a book of 19th Century poetry when I was eight or nine in a book that my mom had used in college. The  poem has elements of both having panache and being quixotic.

Panche because it's about a gaily bedight and gallant knight who sings a song as he searches for Eldorado. Over time, he becomes disillusioned because his quest has not been realized. Quixotic because he's reminded by a pilgrim (i.e., another person on a quest) that he must "Ride, boldly ride" if he's ever to reach his goal. Eldorado written El Dorado means the golden man. Perhaps the shade is reminding the knight what he must do to be the man the wants to be. Eldorado is one of Poe's last works; perhaps the poet wrote it as a reflection on his own life quests.

With Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand popularized the word panache in French and English. The word is first used in Act One and is Cyrano's last word before he dies: 

CYRANO: Yes, the last of the laurel is cut alright,
And the rose is withered. Nevertheless, tonight
When I make my sweeping bow at heaven's gate,
One thing I shall still possess, at any rate,
Unscathed, something outlasting mortal flesh,
And that is . . . [He holds his sword aloft.]
[The sword falls from his hands, he staggers and falls into the arms of LE BRET and RAGUENEAU]
ROXANE[Leaning over to kiss his brow]: That . . .that is?
CYRANO [opening his eyes and smiling at her]: My panache.

Rostand would say later that "panache is nothing but grace; . . .a grace which is so difficult to retain in the face of death, a grace which demand so much grace." I think it's more than that. Heroic young men are described as having daring and panache. Some gallant old men are admired or criticized for quixotic. Both words however evoke the same feeling of searching for an ideal in the real world.


Perhaps having panache and being quixote are pretty much the same thing. In Cyrano, the old hero brandishes his sword with panache in response to his final challenge, collapses, and dies in the arms of Roxanne the woman that he has loved pure and chaste from a far with old friends nearby.  In Man from La Mancha, Quixote brandishes his sword similairly in response to the start of a new quest, collapses, and dies in the arms of Dulcinea the woman that he has loved pure and chaste from a far while old friend and squire Sancho stands nearby. Both men have panache in their last moments, and both are being quixotic. 

This blog so far has been about a 19th Century heroic type that has endured until today. It remains a heroic type. Heros with panache or are quixote can easily found nowadays and throughout the 20th Cenury in popular books and the movies from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in The Prisoner of Zenda to Sean Connery in the James Bond movies to Kevin Kline and company in Silverado. That is the heroic type-the Quixote- that I was raised on. What about the Don Quixote that Cervantes wrote about at the turn of the 17th Century who inspired all these great poets, writers and playwrights of the 19th Century?

It's been said the Cervantes Don Quixote should be read at least three times: once as a young man, once as a middle aged man, and once as an old man. The first time that I read it, I was 49 years old. I started reading it here in Phoenix and finished it in a tapas bar in Jaca, Spain while on my first peregrination to Santiago de Compostela. It was an inspiring read, but it was about a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza who were somewhat different than whom that I had known. Later that summer, I even went to see the windmills in La Mancha and visited the home of Dulcinea in El Toloboso.

It seemed to me that the first great novel in the Western canon is about a guy with a mid-life crisis. I probably came to that idea because I was going through my own mid-life crisis while I was reading it, but still I think it is a valid conclusion.The middle-aged Alonso Quixano-a hildago which is a lower rank of Spanish nobility-lives a lean life of forced frugality on the featureless plain of La Mancha. His only pastime is reading books about the adventures of chivalrous knights. As he becomes disillusioned with the reality of his life as it is, he imagines the ideal life that he wants-the life as a knight errant- a life as Don Quixote. He become a knight who in his own mind is greater than Lancelot or Roland As he tried to maintain this ideal identity in his real world, the people around him considered him to mad.

Perhaps he was, and perhaps pursuing an ideal in the real world is quixotic, but for me and others it is an admirable madness. That's what sets Don Quixote apart. Despite their buffoonery, the mad knight and his squire have pathos. Both are on a quest. Quixote wants to be a knight worthy of his love Dulcinea. The less than noble Sancho wants to be ruler of an island by being his master's squire.

Even so, the 17th Century Quixote is not as crazy as he might seem. When he almost receives a concussion testing out his helmet, he is unwilling to test it a second time. When Sancho is unable to see a heroic challenges Quixote says lay at hand, his master dismisses his uncertainty as being the work of evil enemy enchanters. Additionally when they talk about adventures that will lead to Sancho getting his island, they ponder if they'll have to marry noble women to close the deal; it's a thorny issue but not a deal killer.

The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, the second part came into print a decade later. The first part has a lot of physical torment-like really rough Three Stooges humor. Our duo are beaten, whipped, and stoned throughout the story. In the second part, the trauma is more mental. Quixote and Sancho Panza suffer from the burlas or elaborate practical jokes at the hands of others for cruel entertainment. It wears down their resolve. If a person can escape the disillusionment of everyday through madness, how do the mad escape their disillusionment?

The knight and his squire go home to La Mancha. There, they shed their dreams. Sancho Panzo accepts that he will never be a governor of an island. Don Quixote accepts that he will die without his Dulcinea. Without his ideal, the now restored to sanity Alonso Quixano decides to escape the reality around him-not with a brandished sword, but by making his last will and testament where he warns his niece about marrying a man who book about chivalrous knights.

The story of the old hidalgo is one of humor and pathos. Readers have cared about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for 400 years. In the final pages, Cervantes write "whether Don Quixote was simply Alonso Quixano the Good or whether he was Don Quixote of La Mancha, he always had a gentle disposition and was kind in his treatment of others, and for this reason he was dearly loved not only by those in his household, but by everyone who knew him." There is no finer epithet for a man or a knight errant.

Thank you, Valle, for your wonderful exhibition that celebrates La Segunda Parte of the great Spanish novel we call Don Quixote. Thank you for inspiring me to reread this wonderful classic of the Western canon. Thank you for reminding me that it's important to visit our old friends and heroes. Thank you for reminding also of the importance of continuing seek an ideal in this all too real world. As the pilgrim shadow in Eldorado reminds us, we should "boldly ride" if we are searching for the treasure of a better world.


Artwork by Valle Camacho Matute

Chopsticks

I bought some new chopsticks a couple of days ago. Last August, my kitchen didn’t make it when I moved to where I live now. Among the stuff that went missing was an old pair Chinese-style bamboo chopsticks that I had purchased in Bangkok a long time ago. I regularly used them to mostly cook with and sometimes to eat with. They were old, scorched and warped from usage, but they brought back good memories. Whenever I held them in my hand or saw them lying in the drawer with the rest of the cutlery, I’d remember times past.

I learned how to eat with chopsticks back in 1971 when some enterprising Japanese fellows open a yakitori restaurant near where I lived in Guam. I’d stop by the place for grilled chicken kebobs and other tasty morsels that I’d washed down with Kirin beer. I quickly became adept at using chopsticks for any sized food under any condition. Since then, I’ve used chopsticks while eating in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand as well as here in USA in restaurants and at home. Along with good eating, there are lots of great memories of friends and food.

In early 1972, I visited my dad in South Korea for about a month. At the time, he was a brigade commander stationed up by the DMZ. While I was there, my father was feted (along with other Americans at the post) by some local government officials at a traditional kisaeng house, and he took me along. We were served a huge multi-course Korean feast. My dad asked our hosts if they could rustle up a knife, spoon and fork for me, but he needed have bothered. I was more comfortable eating with chopsticks than the other Americans there-including him. I was able to eat with élan; I even could pick up the tiny pickled garlic cloves that eluded the rest of the Americans.

During my time in the Land of Morning Calm, I would eat lunch with a Korean friend when my dad was at his office. Usually we’d eat kimchee and rice using chopsticks. It was a nice and peaceful eating event that I remember with great fondness.

A few months after I returned Korea, I moved to Thailand for a year. In Isabel Allende’s novel Ripper, some of the characters, who supposedly very sophisticated folks, always ate Thai food in their home with chopsticks for an authentic culinary experience. I’ve also been to Thai restaurants in America that provide them on request. The truth, however, is that Thais normally use a tablespoon and a fork when eating-except, of course, when they’re eating Chinese or East Asian food. 

In particular, there are restaurants that specialize in serving a Chinese noodle soup called Gwit Diow. This wonderful soup is always eaten using chopsticks and a spoon. While I was in Thailand in 1972-73, I must have consumed galleons of this yummy fare.

When I return to Thailand during the 90s and since then, chopsticks are reserved for eating at East Asian restaurants and Gwit Diow shops. There is, of course, the Thai suki, but that’s more like Japanese shabu shabu and Chinese hot pot, and chopsticks and soups are the normal utensils in those eateries that specialize in that delicious communal repast. In Thailand, it’s normal to eat with friends and family. In fact, the lone Thai diner is considered a sad oddity. So, I have lots of culinary memories both using chopsticks or not.

Over the years, I’ve shown some of my young friends how to use chopsticks. Not too long ago, I got at text from one of them telling me how she went on date to eat sushi. She was able to use her chopsticks, but her date couldn’t. I was so proud.

As the picture shows, chopsticks come in different sizes and styles. Once when I returned from Bangkok, I bought some of my friends some very elegant chopsticks made out teak and other exotic woods. Some of my female friends still have theirs; they use them to put up the hair. 

To replace my old Chinese chopsticks I brought informal Japanese ones. They’re not fancy, but I like them. They bring back great memories.

17 March 2015

eye doctor today
slowly I am going blind___
look a pretty girl!

every sight seen reveals truth
new glasses are on order