Longing and Desire: Forsaking the Hillbilly Christmas

I've begun a monumental task, and I'll confess it here.  I've never read "Don Quixote," so I have downloaded it.  I have begun.  Sort of.  I fell asleep last night before I got through Harold Bloom's introduction.  Bloom, as is his want, compares Cervantes to Shakespeare.  The two died simultaneously, apocryphally on the same day (in truth, same day, different calendars).  I'd like to say they were born on the same day, too, but it is not true.  Nonetheless, they were contemporaries and supposedly great writers.  "Don Quixote" is considered to be the first novel and oft referred to as the greatest.  I have read the required chapters of "Quixote," of course, but not close to the entire thing.  I go there as a mendicant, I guess, looking for some explanation of the meaning of life.  My understanding is that I will find a rage against the injustices of existence, the primary one being death (which I assume to hold old-age as part of its realm).  It is the Spanish Bible, Bloom suggests.  I don't know if Hemingway the Spanish King ever read it, but it seems he must have.  I know a lot about Hem, but I don't know that. 

We'll see if I have fortitude and interest enough to finish the novel (or even Bloom's introduction for that matter). 

I've changed my music back to jazz, and I think it helpful. That hillbilly stuff was making me crazy.  A hillbilly's life is not one of joy or even happiness.  It is a life of getting by with minimum effort, with minimum economy, and a shit pale full of heartbreak and bitterness.  McCarthy captures it well in his novels, and I will put them aside for now, too.  I will listen to the wordless expressions of pianos and upright basses and saxophones and trumpets, the melodious ones filled with melancholy and longing.  As does modern literature, jazz makes me feel good knowing that my experience in the world is shared and greatly woven into a beautifully communal aesthetic.  The cut flowers, the worn hundred year old rugs, the leather chairs that are coming my way now. . . they all seem more beautiful.

That hillbilly music is taking me to a bad place that I just can't go on the holidays. 

When I was in Junior High School, my tastes were much shaped by Playboy Magazine.  I hear many of you groaning ("of course they were"), but as I know I've said in holidays past, it wasn't just the women.  I read the thing cover to cover, and the holiday issues were always my favorites.  They promised a life beyond my grasp.  Christmas was full of tuxedos and cocktails and subtly sophisticated gifts you could not buy in my town.  There was the Playboy Jazz Poll which changed my listening habits completely, and there were the cartoons of Gahan Wilson, and every issue ended with "Little Annie Fanny."  And of course, there was the Playboy Interview.  It was Chicago.  It was New York.  It was Monte Carlo. 

And of course, it ruined me.  Writing this, I realize how much.  Desire, my friends, and a twisted sense of humor. 

Still, it would make me happy to read the Christmas edition.  I haven't seen a Playboy magazine since I was in college.  I will buy one today if I can find one.  Where do they sell Playboy anymore?  But it would probably disappoint me.  Better, perhaps, to leave it in memory like Jean Shepard's "A Christmas Story" (I first read his short stories in Playboy) and stick with "Quixote." 

Or maybe not.