Small Happiness

A classic novel. An animated feature film. Two animated Christmas television specials and two documentaries on the same artist. Books of newspaper comics. Looking from a crossroads toward a new year.

And With These We Shall Make Ourselves Eternal and Famous, Not Only in the Present but in Times to Come

Just in time to get it under the wire for my 2023 reading list, I finished Don Quixote as written by Cervantes and translated by Grossman. I was surprised how different the “Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha” is from the First Part. It moves at a very different pace. It has a richly metatextual quality whereby the entire text of the First Part is as known to the characters of the Second Part as it was to Cervantes and his readers of the early seventeenth century. Don Quixote is even aware of a “False Quixote,” an unauthorized continuation of Cervantes’s story that was published by a writer named Avellaneda during the ten-year interregnum before Cervantes himself got around to finishing his tale properly.

Much of the Second Part is taken up with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza falling in with a distinguished duchess and duke who have read the First Part, understand the unique nature of Don Quixote’s chivalric madness and Sancho’s role as foil and sidekick and are possessed by both an openhearted curiosity that compels them to run repeated experiments on our boys as well as the financial means and social standing to do so.

These interwoven series of sequences that unfold under the duchess’s and duke’s auspices represent Cervantes flipping the entire First Part on its head. In the First Part D.Q. and Sancho repeatedly sally out into Spain and test the peculiarities of their strange personalities and quirky dynamic against whatever surprises and challenges the world can produce; in the Second Part the duchess and duke act as stand-ins for the reader and for Cervantes, exploring what would happen not if the broad world was at the mercy of our protagonists and had to put up with their antics but if D.Q. and Sancho could instead be confined to a series of controlled environments where a vivacious married couple with a mischevious sense of humor and effectively unlimited resources could contrive to subject D.Q. to what appear to be genuine versions of the enchanted scenarios he is usually projecting onto a disenchanted reality and to give Sancho a fully-realized simulation of the governorship D.Q. has long been promising him, just to observe how well Sancho will distinguish himself as a head of state. (He turns out, in a roundabout way, to do rather well at it and wisely determines after a relatively short amount of time that it’s not worth it and that the humble life as a squire to a nutjob is the true path for him.)

Towards the very end of the novel, before D.Q. is manipulated into agreeing to be confined to his unnamed home village for a year where he eventually and painfully goes sane, renounces books of chivalry and dies from melancholia, he first speaks to Sancho of a desire for them to buy a flock of sheep, invite D.Q.’s friends the bachelor, barber and priest to join them and spend the year wandering “the mountains, the woods, and the meadows” singing and composing poetry. I find myself knowing this stormy winter just precisely how he feels.

Defeated, Exhausted and Helpless

I watched, for the third and probably not last time, The Simpsons Movie, directed by series supervising director David Silverman and released in 2007. It remains better than anyone had any reason to expect it to be given the contemporary quality of the show around that time and it seems to get better with the passage of years, a succinct and eminently watchable bit of visually appealing animation and solid comedy writing.

This caps off my multi-year sequential watching of every episode of the first eighteen seasons of the program, some of which (the classic years) I have seen ten times or more and some (selections from, say, the fourteenth through eighteenth seasons) I had never previously seen at all. I’m on the fence about whether to soldier on and keep watching episodes of The Simpsons in order but I do have the DVD of the nineteenth season checked out from the library. I’m looking at it on my bedside shelf right now. It is giving me an eye right back.

After that it was back-to-back Peanuts Christmas specials in one sitting: the original 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas and the 1992 update It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, both directed by Bill Melendez.

Then back-to-back documentaries about Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, directed by Mary Lance in 2002, and Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, directed by Kathleen Brennan (not the Kathleen Brennan who’s married to Tom Waits; I checked) and Jina Brenneman in 2016. Martin has been one of my very favorite artists since the moment I stumbled upon my first awareness of her work some years ago on a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has a room devoted to several of her finest paintings.

The earlier documentary observes Martin’s life near its end when she was an accomplished, methodical and focused eccentric inhabiting monastically simple surroundings in small-town New Mexico; the latter film examines everything in her life from birth up until her period of voluntary itinerancy and permanent settling in New Mexico. In both documentaries come some dollops of creative wisdom of which I am in eager need these days.

In Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, Agnes herself remarks: “I found out the best way is to just — just look around, you know; you don’t see anything. And just be in the mood for the truth. It’s a happy state of mind. Very, you know, small happiness. And then…then you stay alert, you see; you don’t see anything but you have to stay alert. And then it just comes into your mind. What to do. And you can have an inspiration about anything. Some people live by inspiration. Some people — most people live by intellect. They take all the facts and decide what’s best and all that. But inspiration is much better. You just say you want to do something or you say ‘What can I do?’ And then you wait.”

There’s also some useful talk of how Agnes thought that “it’s quite enough to investigate your own negative feelings and that you’ll learn the truth about life by investigating your own mistakes and not worrying about the mistakes of others. Your own will be enough.” As someone who has recently been trying to head myself off from turning into the type of person I currently tend to criticize, I could do with a sustained period of more Martinesque self-investigation.

Agnes Martin: Before the Grid buttresses these off-the-cuff sentiments with a quotation from a bit of Martin’s published philosophical writing:

Defeated, exhausted and helpless you will perhaps go a little bit further.

There is no way out. You may as well go ahead with as little resistance as possible — and eat everything on your plate.

Thus I shall attempt to do this coming new year if only I can gather my breath and figure out how.

Squiring the Sailor

The library demanded that Popeye book back and have now mysteriously changed its shelving classification to “In-library use only,” so I can’t get it back for now. Before returning it I did finish reading Phelps’s introduction, which for all of its shittiness did make an interesting connection between Segar and Cervantes, describing Castor Oyl as “squiring the sailor, becoming his grousing, Sancho-like foil” exhibiting a “ferrety, Quixote-Panza personality.” I had previously posited that Homer Simpson might instantiate an animated composite of both D.Q. and Sancho, so Phelps’s remark about Castor and Popeye (practically the only insightful thing he wrote in an otherwise unreadably dense and painfully overstuffed essay) got me thinking of other Quixotic cartoon combos. Peppermint Patty and Marcie. Calvin and Hobbes. Rick and Morty.

I also got back from the library my needed copy of Amend’s Jam-Packed FoxTrot so that I may now return to reading it, several pages per day. This was after having finished another FoxTrot collection entitled Some Clever Title: A FoxTrot Collection Blah Blah Blah. Going to ground while the world risks spinning off its axis, I’m also stocking up on classic collections of very favorite comics of diverse styles and eras: Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts 1961 to 1962 and Love is Hell by Groening.

And, may I be forgiven, I’m going to read a copy of The Second Garfield Treasury by Jim Davis that I found in a Little Free Library.

One of my distant relations, a third cousin, was wounded fighting in the war. His arm was damaged when his unit was struck by an RPG attack. It seems like he is eventually going to be more or less okay but has a long period of recovery and physical therapy ahead. I don’t know the guy but I’m proud of him and I hope he comes out of this alright. The war, its cascade of changes to our politics and societies and all of the disquieting denialism and caustic rhetoric swirling thereabout feel at once so perilously close at hand and so distant as to seem almost hypothetical. It’s a jarring dissonance.

I want to get back into doing more volunteer work. Surely volunteering is the inverse of and antidote to the manner by which many of us, occasionally including me, have been screeching and scoffing at one another for the past several months and years. The other day when I felt myself spinning out I texted my adult literacy learner and asked if we could get together for a tutoring session. When we did we ended up giving ourselves permission not to do any substantive work and mostly just shot the shit. She told me that no one knows what is going to happen tomorrow and so it is imperative to take life a day at a time. She told me when I get depressed or agitated to pick up my pens and draw pretty pictures. She told me that when we get back into working together for her new college semester in January, she wants to see me “strong and happy.” She made me promise I would do my best.

It’s been a deliriously fun, stimulating, maddening, complicated, interesting, harrowing, exasperating and life-altering year. This bitter hibernatory winter and into the new year, back to the world, I’ll be reading books and watching movies for fun. I need to shut up and make psychedelic dinosaur cartoons more than I need to write. I need to read those good comics I like, and maybe try some I don’t.

I need to read Ellroy. I had the library pull down from the shelves for me a collection of his short pieces that I haven’t read since adolescence. I started in on it over the last few days. It already reminds me of what his hardboiled highwire act of a writing oeuvre has meant and continues to mean to me. I enjoy reading his work.