I heard the show on Don Quijote.

The show was on the whole good, though as a veteran reader of the Quijote I didn’t, alas, hear anything that I didn’t already know.

My big surprise was the mediocre performance by Diana de Armas Wilson. I had read a number of her article which showed original insight into the text. On the show her comments were mediocre at best and didn’t rise above the level of a junior college introductory course.

Professor James Iffland, whose work I am not familiar, was much better.

I was especially taken aback by the shallow historical comment thrown out by Professor de Armas Wilson. Her attempt to politicize the literary discussion was unfortunate.

No one made one of the most important historical data for understanding the Don. As an Hidalgo he belongs to the minor aristocracy. This means that his status is higher than his economic means for supporting it. Hidalgos were not allowed to earn a living either by manual or mental labor in order to support themselves. They could only live off their lands.

Any minor aristocrat who broke the rules would lose his honor and his status as an hidalgo. Cervantes had in his exemplary novels (stories) dealt with this and many other themes that he introduces in the Quijote.

The Don’s socio-economic status is not an unimportant datum. IN his first excursion he doesn’t even take money with him and is lectured by a hard headed realist inn keeper about the facts of economic life.

The discussion on the radio touched on many issues but didn’t work out any of them. There should have been a way to combine some central themes and than settling a root theme which incorporate many of the other themes and motifs.

I would have chosen the uses of the imagination which would place the Membrino’s basin helmet since in many ways its central to the poetics of the novel.

It isn’t true that the object was a basin which a psychotic Don Quijote mistakes for a hamlet.

That’s too easy and would turn the novel into a conventional story about illusion. Too Cervantes the helmet, he coins a new term “baciyelmo,� to characterize the object. Object for Quijote and perhaps Cervantes do not have either intrinsic meanings or functions: their meanings and functions depend on the perspective of the viewer. (The Spanish phenomenologist Ortega Y Gasset wrote insightfully on this issue.)

The point is that this view is at the heart of the Cervantine poetics in this novel.

Still the radio program did bring up some other important issues and I enjoyed listening to Bud Parr.

Thank you- again great guests and an inspiring show. This really picked me up off the floor from the show about how “off center” we are. And yet— weren’t we still talking about it ?The Irish called their problems ‘the troubles” , The Israeli’s call theirs “the situation”. They manage to draw a line around it and go on.

as always OpenSource have raised to the ocassion with a witty, insightful, fluid conversation on a universal literature piece. the “comment on Empire” was appropriately thought-provoking as were the take on Castro & Chaves, which I didn’t now about. from susan sontag’s comment on “great epic on addiction”

as always OpenSource have raised to the ocassion with a witty, insightful, fluid conversation on a universal literature piece. the “comment on Empire” was appropriately thought-provoking as were the take on Castro & Chaves, which I didn’t now about.

“The 11 million adults who are not literate in English include people who may be fluent in another language, such as Spanish, but are unable to comprehend text in English.�

Hey cheeseman, you forgot to tell us that the eleven million could read Don Quxote in the original language.