Intermission

"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who did all these things were driven to them... but... why should you go crazy? What lady has rejected you...? "That is exactly it," replied Don Quixote, "that's just how beautifully I've worked it all out - because for a knight errant to go crazy for good reason, how much is that worth? My idea is to become a lunatic for no reason at all...

It's heating up, and the windows to the loft are open to their maximum height creating a gaping openness along the north wall which overlooks the hotels and meeting rooms across the alley. I have lay here for the last two nights taking refuge from a week that is still revealing its repercussions even though it ended 4 days ago. I lie in bed and wait... for something, and I listen. The sounds that are offered by the open windows are an ambient mix of sirens across the avenues, drunks yelling in the alley, choppers gunning red lights, heavy smokers clanging in the dumpsters, and the cheesy blues music coming from the bar downstairs. I am in refuge from the first days of summer.

So it seems like as good a time as any to fill you in on my hot weather reading plan while we take a break from the lowly debauchery that has pretty much defined the past 4 months here at Big and Tall. The final pages of Conrad's Heart of Darkness are giving way to sunny skies and lazy days. What better way to fill them with none other than the mammoth Don Quixote. I had been planning on this since I read Auster's New York Trilogy through the tail end of winter, and it was heavily referenced throughout all three stories for its relation to the world of make believe. Last summer it was Dickens. Love, drama, and tragedy. This summer it will be Cervantes. Illusion, delusion. and fantasy. It will last all summer, until fall, when a re-read of On the Road is planned.

So I lay it out for you here and now gentle reader, the things that will be influencing the always impressionable Low over the next few months. You will find that I will lose my self in central characters and plot lines until you find that you have lost your own self in a quiet, melancholic, and epic summer novel. Rendered in brown and yellow.