About to Read Don Quixote

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Don QuixoteGentle reader: you already know that this article on Don Quixote—the product of my eccentric intellect—is intended to be the greatest article I could possibly write. Unfortunately, it will probably suck; but I urge you onward nonetheless. The problem is not me, you see, but Miguel de Cervantes, and the fact that he was born in Spain and thus spoke Spanish. This is a problem, for just as you know the worthiness of my intent, you surely know that I am fluent in the Spanish language, in the sense that I can neither read nor write it. Not surprisingly, I am also unable to speak it.

The Need for Translators

Perhaps I am being too hard on Cervantes; had he been born in, say, England, he would have written in that transitional early modern English—which really means, “not modern English”. In fact, at least Miguel (if only he had been born 420 years later in California, I’m sure we would have been on a first name basis) is translated. These days, Shakespeare’s plays are set everywhere other than where and how they were intended, but we’re still left with the same damn language. I often wonder why we can’t get over this. Let’s just acknowledge that we all know all the common Shakespeare misquotes (like “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” which is way more pithy than what that bard actually wrote anyway) and let the translators have at those plays. And by “have at”, I don’t mean in that Tom Stoppard “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” way; I mean in the way that translators of de (if only he had been born 420 years later in California, I’m sure we would have been on a second name basis, too) try to recreate the experience the original readers had for modern readers. (Or translators of Goethe or Rabelais—writers who, strangely, I like a lot more than that bard.)

But this does present a problem. You see, being as I am a poorly educated physics PhD (“fud”), I have been working for years trying to read all the books that my humanities studying friends always seemed like they had read. (I later found out that they had not read most of those books—they had simply read about them; but that has not quelled my urge.) I have only two books left that I must read: Moby Dick and Don Quixote. So recently, I decided to buy a copy of DQ (I already own a copy of MD), and I went into a bookstore: one of those big ones with the coffee and multiple floors (no, not Powell’s Books—I would have noticed if I had been there; it was Borders or Barns and Noble or something like that; not a bad bookstore, but certainly not a good one, and certainly not one with any used books; but I digress). And I go to the Literature section and after much difficulty (I have real trouble alphabetizing), I find Don Quixotes. That’s right: plural. There were six different translations. Imagine if I had been in Powell’s?!

Which Don Quixote will I read?! There is no one around to help, or rather, the help I am offered is like that from my sister, who tells me, after reading Moby Dick in high school, “You don’t need to read it.” I have two options: go to a used bookstore and read the cheapest version I can find, or determine for myself which translation to read. I settle on the latter, so I can write this article. If you are starting to imagine the snowball effect, I assure you, it is more like Sisyphus.

The Test

Obviously, I can’t read all the translations in order to determine which transition to read. I needed a test. I decided to take a single sentence from Don Quixote and compare how the different translators handled it. In this way, I figured that I could find the one with the most modern punch—the one that would thrill me like “A Confederacy of Dunces”. I chose the first sentence of the Prologue of Part One. Here it is in Spanish:

Descoupado lector: sin juramento me podras creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el mas hermosa, el mas gallardo y mas discreto que pudiera imaginarse

Google translates this as follows:

Idle reader: I swear you can not believe that I would this book as a child’s understanding, was the most beautiful, the most gallant and more discreet than one might imagine.

Are computers good at translating or what? Based on this, you would think Cervantes was a nut-job: he’s talking gibberish here! But you can glean a few things from this “translation”. First: Miguel was a nut-job, but in a good way; he is directly addressing the reader, but he’s being sarcastic—I think. Second: he seems to be promising something, and that something seems to be that this book is, while not exactly good, a lot better than you would expect from him. Third: I can’t think of anything. And this is after reading six human translations of this sentence. Google Translate has me completely confused. “I would this book as a child’s understanding”?! And these guys are billionaires!

Samuel Putnam

The Modern Library translation uses the not so modern translation of the great Samuel Putnam. For years, this seems to have been the translation, because it is the one I find in many different forms most often in used bookstores. It is the only copy I currently own, but this should not be taken to mean I believe it the best. Putnam translates our sentence thusly:

Idling reader, you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be the fairest, the sprightliest, and the cleverest that could be imagined.

Actually, Putnam goes on to the next sentence by use one of my favorite punctuation symbols: the semicolon. And this makes sense, but I cannot go into it here, we have many other translations to get to. Let me just say about this translation that it isn’t bad. Sure, “the child of my brain” is kind of Google-like. Just the same, it is clear that Putnam “gets” the humor. I particularly like the phrase, “should have” that no other translator uses; I think it makes a great deal of difference.

Also, one cannot avoid a few facts about this translation. First, it is considered to be the first truly modern translation. Of course, we are in the post-modern period, which is why we have so many different translations now: who is to say which is the best? (Harold Bloom, of course.) Second, Putnam has pretty much been in print ever since it was published—over sixty years. That must say something, but don’t ask me what.

Burton Raffel

The Norton Critical Editions version of Don Quixote was translated by a live guy—in 1999: Professor Burton Raffel. Here’s his shot:

Leisurely reader: you don’t need me to swear that I longed for this book, born out of my own brain, to be the handsomest child imaginable, the most elegant, the most sensible.

Okay, the prose is better than Putnam, but Raffel had 50 years to out-do him. And here, I really like the phrase, “I longed for.” This edition does include a very helpful map of “Spain at the End of the Sixteenth Century.” But I am not one to be swayed by such editorial tricks.

Charles Jarvis

Now we must go way back to the 1742 publication of the painter Charles Jarvis (or Jervis, depending upon whom you ask). Note that this was when the translation was first published; Jarvis must have done the translation some time before then, because he was dead at that time. It is now used as the basis for the Oxford World Classics version. Here’s Jarvis’ crack:

You may believe me without an oath, gentle reader, that I wish this book, as the child of my brain, were the most beautiful, the most sprightly, and the most ingenious, that can be imagined.

Again with the brain! The main thing to notice with the last two translations is that they aren’t hooking into the humor. Cervantes is playful, and while you hear this with Putnam, you just don’t with Raffel and Jarvis. In Raffel’s defense, he gets going after this sentence and his translation is far better than Jarvis’ and in some ways better than Putnam.

A Most Vexing Trip

I originally thought that Peter Motteux’s translation dated from the Victorian period, because of its pomposity. In fact, it is the earliest translation that I looked at—dating back to 1712. Predating Jarvis by only three decades (When a decade meant something!), this translation seems like it comes from another world. I still find its writing style “sticky.” Are you ready to get gooey? Motteux will now hit us with his best shot:

You may depend upon my bare Word, Reader, without any farther Security, that I cou’d wish this Offspring of my Brain were as ingenious, sprightly, and accomplish’d as your self could desire.

This translation actually does sound humorous, but it does not capture the irony and self-deprecation of the original. In fact, it reads as parody. This is the stuff of Monty Python lampoon; you can imagine the “great” Shakespearean actor reciting these lines with much bombast. And in this way, the translation only gets better. But for my purposes, it gets worse.

There is at least one nice thing to be said about the Motteux translation: It was used as the basis for a “young adult” condensation of the story in 1939, The Adventures of Don Quixote De La Mancha by Leighton Barret and illustrated (beautifully) by Warren Chappell. It is perhaps a day’s read for a very slow reader, and worth the effort if you do not feel up to the full text.

Walter Starkie

Moving on to 1964 and Walter Starkie’s unabridged translation (yes, he did it more than once), which is found in the Signet Classic Don Quixote. Let’s just get to it, shall we:

Idle reader, you need no oath of mine to convince you that I wish this book, the child of my brain, were the handsomest, the liveliest, and the wisest that could be conceived.

A little dry, I think. Like Raffel, however, he does get a bit of a groove going after this. Unfortunately, also like Raffel, it isn’t that good a groove. It definitely seems readable, and at $7.95 for a new copy, it is the cheapest, I have found.

The Blue Whale: Edith Grossman

But now all of the Sperm and Humpbacks must scatter, because the Blue Whale has arrived: Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of Don Quixote. I must admit to starting out with a bit of a prejudice against this version because of its stamp of approval by the ranting—western civilization is going to hell because of post-modern scholarship, even though I am a post-modern scholar—Harold Bloom. But let us leave this for now; I can rant about Bloom’s ranting some other time. Let’s see what Dr. Grossman has to offer:

Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine.

It does have a certain self-deprecating charm that is not found in any of the other translations. And it doesn’t use the word “brain”! (Although I think this is academic; to me, the word is “mind”; what Cervantes goes on to talk about is what we would now call the workings of his “mind” or his “creativity”—not his “understanding”.) But after it, the humor becomes more muddled than that of most of the other translations. Perhaps this is due to age, she is about to turn 74; maybe she just isn’t feeling that funny. Plus, she’s probably had to spend some time with Bloom.

But there are other problems. You will notice that this translation has the most words of the lot, except for Putnam, who has the same number: 37. And it has bigger words; her translation has far more characters than any other. She probably does capture aspects of Don Quixote that no other translator has (Bloom makes this claim, and as much as I may dislike his popular writing, he is a very intelligent and erudite man). But I am not looking for a Don Quixote that makes me feel “the spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline”; I want a fun read.

My Decision

Where does this leave me? (Probably without readers as of the appearance of Putnam several screens back.) There are many more translations; what I have presented is quite incomplete. But from what I’ve seen, from Putnam onward, there isn’t much difference between the translations. This is based upon very little evidence, of course—but more than just the sentence I have been discussing.

My decision is to read Putnam. It helps that I already own it, but this is not why I am choosing it. Raffel’s translation is quite good. I think it is a close second to Putnam, but it is second. After him would probably come Starkie.

If I were looking for something other than a good read, I might well go with what looks like the most scholarly of the translations: Edith Grossman’s. If it came down to it, Jarvis’ almost 300-year-old translation seems quite readable. As for Motteux, I don’t think I would read it at all if I had to put up with such prose.

More About Don Quixote

Want to know more about Don Quixote and matters related? Check out our ongoing project:

Don Quixote in English

John Stewart and Jules Shear

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Many years ago, while I was in the process of flunking out of college, John Stewart gave a lecture about nothing in particular and everything in general: his life, songwriting, cars, women, performing. This was only a few years after his hit song Gold, so it was surprising that not many more than a hundred people were in attendance. I had something else that I had to get to, so I knew that I was going to have to slip out of the lecture half-way through. Stewart did not allow me to do this unnoticed, however. He was very friendly throughout; cheerfully chiding me for missing his pearls of wisdom.

After I was done with my thing and he was done with his thing, we happened to run into each other. He remembered me: it had only been two hours and I was, after all, the guy who walked out on him. We walked to his car, which, if I remember correctly was some piece of junk. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember two things he told me. First, he said, never listen to what your friends and family tell you about your work. He said, everyone told him that he sucked—until he sold his first hit and made $50,000 on it (in the early 1960s, I think); people who don’t know you are the only ones who can really see your talent. The second thing he told me was that art was whatever the hell you make it. He had an example: Happiness is a Warm Gun. Now here is a song that is just four song fragments pasted together. By traditional standards, it’s a piece of shit; but as we all know, it is great.

Not long after that, I was playing in band whose name I would prefer to forget because it was pathetic. It consisted of me (who could kind of play and wrote all the songs), Will (who could scream really well), and Roger (who was a very good keyboard player). Roger was about ten years older than Will and me, and he thought he knew music much better than we did (and in a way he did). One day I brought in a song called “Do You Like Life?” I was very pleased with how we did the song, but Roger had a real problem with it. You see, the song had no chorus; it had a bridge kind of thing, but it was really just a chant. Roger said, as he often did, “You can’t do that!”

A couple of weeks later, Will and I meet up with Roger and he is very excited: he wants to play a song for us. It was Lovers By Rote off the first Jules and the Polar Bears album Got No Breeding. In the song, Jules Shear does something similar to what I was doing (admittedly, what I was doing was more extreme). His “bridge” went:

All you really gotta do is tug a little leash to find yourself constricted
All you really gotta do is think about the crime to find yourself convicted

And Roger relented, “I guess you can do that!” I know that people said the same thing about Beethoven’s First Symphony. “You can’t start a symphony with a dominant seventh chord!” Who do these people think they are? How do they think any field of art progresses?

Or maybe it is all about me. Beethoven was established. John Lennon was established. I was not. But in general, innovation comes from those who are not established. I think that John Stewart was keenly aware of that. And as for Jules Shear and me: I don’t think either of us care.

Hand Sanitizers

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These days, it seems that hand sanitizers are getting a bad rap: kids eat the stuff and get sick. This is not surprising, given that they are about 60% ethyl alcohol. Just the same, as far as I know, none of these children were badly harmed—much less killed—and I’m sure they learned valuable lessons, like don’t eat cleaning products. The fact is that the benefits of hand sanitizers far out-weigh the potential risks—just like flu shots.

Recently a research paper was published by Van Camp and Ortega in Aviat Space Environment Med, 2007; 78:140-142. It is called Hand sanitizer and rates of acute illness in military aviation personnel. They found that when hand sanitizers are readily available, the level of acute illness goes down by almost 300%, with a similar decrease in the number of sick days experienced by the pilots. Many other papers find similar results.

So don’t believe any of the fears about the dangers of hand sanitizers. Aproximately 5000 children die each year in the United States in car accidents. No child has died from hand sanitizers, and I assume that some children have died because of diseases that they would not have got if they had used hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer is a good thing.

But please: watch your kids after you give it to them. Maybe even let them have a tiny taste so they know that it tastes really bad. The main thing is to take care your your kinds and keep your hands off my sanitizer.

Getting to the Bottom of Things

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Today, I need to discuss the defecation and urination processes. I stress the word “need” because I really don’t want to. These days, I always carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer for general uses, but particularly so that I can get out of public restrooms; there is the old question about how one gets out of such a place; after washing your hands, you still have to open the door; answer: wash hands, open door, sanitize. Am I starting to sound a little crazy? Read on.

Close the Lid

Public restrooms are particularly bad places, regardless of how clean they appear. In the United States, over the past year, I recall seeing only one toilet that had a lid. Many people have studied the resulting spray from flushed toilets. The first study I heard about was over twenty years ago, but I can’t remember it now, but thankfully Sarah Tan has written a nice online article (probably for a class), Think Before You Flush or Brush; it is a disgusting subject, but she deals with it tastefully (mostly).

For me, this is personal. I don’t like being covered in fecal matter. Even more: I don’t like brushing my teeth with fecal matter. Even the idea of urine on my toothbrush makes me sick. So unless you are into that kind of thing (and I know some of you are), close the lid! And if you are in a public restroom, get fully dressed and flush and run.

Sit Down

An old joke…

Q: Why do dogs lick their balls?
A: Because they can.

Why do men urinate standing up? Because they’re pigs. Even assuming that a man lifts the toilet seat, some fraction of his urine stream will end up on the toilet and the ground around it. Krok7 has done a few calculations on his blog in an article, The Physics Behind Toilet Seat Splatter (in truth, he doesn’t do too good a job–I think he greatly understates the problem, but you get the idea). Yes, I know that urine is not so very disgusting, but it does have an unpleasant oder—especially as time goes on.

One of the comments to this article states that it is not practical to ask guys to sit down while urinating. Why is this? Don’t we sit down when we defecate? Are we so much more busy than woman that we can’t spare that extra 30 seconds in the bathroom. For God’s sake men, just sit down and shut up.

Gargantua

I am not alone in thinking about such matters. The 16th Century French writer Francois Rabelais thought about it a lot too. There is no doubt that he was the Joseph Heller of his day. I’m sure people couldn’t stop laughing while reading any of his five books Gargantua and Pantagruel. And I even find him funny sometimes. But the basis of most of his comedy is repetition. Case in point: Chapter 13 of Book 1.

In this chapter, Gargantua tells his father, Grangousier of the many things he used to clean his anus: 57 all told (really: all told). The satire is not lost on me; Rabelais makes it very clear when Gargantua uses a lawyer’s briefcase to clean his behind; or all the live animals he uses; or women’s clothing: “Once I mopped my scut with the velvet scarf of a damozel. It was pleasurable: the soft material proved voluptuous and gratifying to my hindsight.” [Caveat]

Despite all this hilarity, I do believe Rabelais was serious about the question of how one goes about keeping one’s anus clean. He does not provide a very good answer: the neck of a (I assume live) goose. But then, he did not have the luxury of a bidet. Then again, neither do I.

Howard Stern’s autobiography lists his approach (not surprising): three swipes with toilet paper and you are done. He does not go into details, but I believe he does this because he has learned from experience that making too many swipes will result in skin irritation if not bleeding. Despite the fact that all of this makes me very uncomfortable, I will propose my own solution.

A Clean Wipe

I suggest getting a small Tupperware container filled water as well as a hand sanitizer dispenser. Place them near your toilet. Remove the Tupperware lid. Make a couple of swipes with dry toilet paper. Wet a wad of toilet paper and make another swipe. Finish with one last dry wipe. Sanitize your hands and replace the lid on the Tupperware container. Sans a bidet, this is about the best you can do.

I am sorry about all this, but I do think that Francois would approve.

Pandora’s Box

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Okay, let’s get this out of the way. My first experience with Internet radio was with Last.fm. And I know there are many others: Deezer.com, Mee Mix, Musicovery, Play It, Slacker, as well as many other similar kinds of services. I really liked the way that Last.fm worked, but it stopped working for me, so I switched to the Music Genome Project and Pandora.

It is nothing new, but if you aren’t using it, you should be. I’ve found so many great artists this way. Just tonight, I discovered Pink Anderson (the Pink of Pink Floyd) and the Red House Painters. I feel a little ashamed that I only discovered them tonight, but I can’t be smart all the time. Red House Painters came up right after I entered American Music Club as a new station. I discovered Anderson on my Old Blues stations that I have been tinkering with for a good six months now.

The great thing about Pandora is that I use it while cooking and sometimes (every night) someone comes on who causes me to stop everything and find out more. And, of course, it is good for commerce, because I just bought three new CDs (sorry folks, I still like CDs—and albums; I bought Presenting… Julie Andrews and the first John Prine album last night) because of what I heard on Pandora tonight.

The bad side is that I heard The Kid With the Replaceable Head by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. This made me think, “I should really get Destiny Street again—more because of the liner notes than anything (it isn’t as good as Blank Generation) because Hell makes it clear whose guitar solos are whose (not that I really need to be told; Ivan Julian is a better guitarist than Robert Quine—I just think Quine is more creative, which is not a slam against Julian; he’s great and enormously under-rated). But the only copy available is almost $100. I suppose that isn’t so bad when you consider that you can’t find my second book (now out of print) for less than $100—usually around $150). I don’t even own a copy!

Update: 25 July 2010

Destiny Street has dropped to $30, while by book has gone up to $200 used or $400 new. One good bit of news: I found out that the book was not dropped; the publisher just went out of business.

Elvie Thomas

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Am I the only person who has noticed just how much Wikipedia sucks? (See: I won’t even provide a link.) Wikipedia has no listing on Elvie Thomas and when mentioned on Geeshie Wiley’s page it refers to Thomas as a man! Yes, for things that don’t much matter, like Sirius Black’s family background, Wikipedia is the go-to source. And it is good for a lot of hard science (but not all; there are errors; and you are usually better off going elsewhere—like a book). It is terrible for history and politics; for example, it seems there is no consensus that George Hearst was a villainous bastard (which he most clearly was). For little known artists and thinkers: forget about it.

J. D. Salinger Dies 19 June 1965 at Age 46

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It is surprising that the death of J. D. Salinger should get so much press this week when he died over 45 years ago—on the publication of his last short story in The New Yorker.

Okay; so maybe his heart was still beating and maybe he was continuing to be an asshole to his wife, but as far as I’m concerned, he died that day, and I don’t give a fuck if it took another 44 years, 7 months, and 8 days for his heart to stop beating. I don’t get it, and for that matter, I don’t get the reverence that people show towards him and The Catcher in the Rye. It just isn’t that good a book. I think of it like Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road. Neither are good, but both are held in high regard.

I suppose it has something to do with the fact that both books speak to young people who don’t know much about literature. It is like kids who heard Pat Boone singing Ain’t That a Shame who thought that it was rock-n-roll until they heard the Fats Domino’s original. They just don’t know no better. I will grant you that Salinger was an extremely gifted writer and I would much rather read him than I would Kerouac; but Kerouac was the real deal; Salinger was the poser and I think that is why he didn’t publish anything after his literary death: he knew if he kept writing, people would realize that his early work was more style than substance and that he would suffer the same fate that later befell Susan Eloise Hinton.

But why not just admit that you are a Truman Capote? Why not admit that you are a fine writer, not a prophet. As it is, Tolstoy left us only two great books (with almost 25 more years and many fewer distractions) because he was too wrapped up in being a Great Man. Both Salinger and Tolstoy will go down in history as great men, while Capote will go down in history as an asshole. But what does that matter? Capote provided me with more pleasure than those other two combined.

So I’m not sad that J. D. stopped breathing yesterday. I am sad that he stopped publishing 45 years ago. I’m sad that I didn’t think Catcher in the Rye was a good book when I read it as a young man. And most of all, I’m sad that I’ll have to go out tomorrow and buy it (because my copy has inexplicitly disappeared) and read the damned thing again to see if maybe I was wrong about it.

The Onion

The Onion has written more eloquently about J. D. Salinger than I ever could. Understanding that there has been a lot of Salinger fan fiction written will make the following article particularly funny:

New Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding

Understanding that Holden Caulfield (the main character of The Catcher in the Rye) calls people “phony” will make the following article particularly funny:

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

Cream of Potato Soup

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Cut up potato(es) and a half a stick of butter and add it to a medium-sized sauce pan on a lowish temperature. Stir occasionally as you cut up onion(s), carrot(s) and celery stalks. Saute until the whole mixture is kind of mushy. If it gets too dry, add some olive oil—it adds a subtle taste that is very apealing, but not necessary. I was listening to Bruce Cockburn’s The Charity of Night (with Pacing the Cage!)—that clocks in at just over an hour, so that’s how long I would cock this. Now you can set this concoction aside and get out your big aluminum stock pot. At this point, take a moment to feel superior to those fools who think that Aluminum cookware is going to cause Alzheimer’s Disease.

Boil a bunch of water in your Aluminum stock pot. How much? I don’t know: more than a quart. Cut up potato(es) and boil them until they are cooked, but don’t let them get mushy; you already have enough mushy potatoes. When you get “there”, add all of your cocked vegetables and mix it all together. Now add a fair amount of salt and about half of the pepper that you will eventually want in the soup. And add a bay leaf. Let it cook on low for about the length of Janis Ian’s Between the Lines (it is okay to skip At Seventeen or to repeat Watercolors).

During this time, go through your cupboards and refridgerator looking for things that might make this soup more delightful. Pasta is a must. If you use something like angel hair pasta (as I did), make sure you break it into small pieces; this is not some weird Vietnamese soup. Elbow macaroni works well, but requires more cooking. The truth is that everyone has old pasta lying around for years; this is the way to get rid of it. Remove the bay leaf.

The other thing you need to look for is stuff to turn what should be, at this point, a perfectly fine soup into an exquisite cream soup. I had left over sour cream, some box milk, and (because I am who I am) a cup of heavy cream. Cream cheese would work well too. Add whatever cream you can until you feel the need to consult a cardiologist.

Finally, add the rest of your pepper. Enjoy it, but don’t eat it all now because it will be even better tomorrow.

Mom’s Recipes

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My mother was an excellent cook; she had her own restaurant for about a decade. There were several dishes that I wanted her recipes for: Chicken Cacciatore, her chili, and especially her Potato Soup. My attempts to get these recipes always went something like this:

“Can I get your Potato Soup recipe?”

“Oh sure,” she would say. “It’s really easy.”

“Great! Do you have it written down?”

“No,” she would say with a small frown. “But’s it’s really easy.”

“Okay,” I’d say. Then I’d get my notebook out and wait for the recipe she had memorized.

She would get a far-away look, like she was remembering cooking the soup. “Well, you just boil some water and add chopped up potatoes.”

“How much water? How many potatoes?” I would ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. Until it looks about right,” she answered unhelpfully.

“Okay. I can boil potatoes.”

“Then you add the pasta,” she said, continuing with the recipe.

“When?” I asked stupidly.

“Oh, I don’t know. When the potatoes look about right,” she answered unhelpfully.

“Okay,” I said. “So I add the pasta. When does the cream go in?”

“Oh! Not until you add the spices,” she answered somewhat helpfully.

“What spices?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Salt and pepper, of course. And a bay leaf. Maybe some Worcestershire sauce. Or paprika.”

“How much?” I would ask, almost giving up.

“Oh, I don’t know. Until it tastes about right.”

“Do you have approximate amounts?” I asked hopefully.

“Not really. But when that’s done, you add the cream,” she said.

I knew not to ask how much cream. Why? Oh, I don’t know.

One Song, Two Song, Song Sung Blue Song

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I have read a couple of sources that indicated that Thompson’s Real has two extra songs, not one. However, from what I can tell, the original album contained 13 songs and the reissue contains 14 songs. I’m good at math: 14 – 13 = 1. It could be that I am wrong about the original album containing 13 songs; maybe it included only 12. Or maybe they took one song away from the original collection and replaced it with two new songs. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. It is still a fine disc.