Sigmoid; Or, Thrown for a bit of a curve

The first few pages of Ivanhoe have been excruciating. I can’t stand the preamble. I want to get to the amble and after a few pages I do, and now I’m wandering with Gurth and Wamba. Do they in anyway resemble DQ & Sancho? Well, yes, on first impression! Is this the real truth of all stories? Is everything a coincidence?

Yesterday, I was looking for a poem about sheep. This is in connection with some work I’m doing on a conference paper about breeding. I spent almost the entire day in my office reading book excerpts from from a fantastic e-resource called “Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. One of the books I read was a ‘necrology’ – something I hadn’t encountered before:

(ne•crol•o•gy (nə-krŏl'ə-jē, nĕ-)
n., pl. -gies.
1. A list of people who have died, especially in the recent past or during a specific period.
2. An obituary.
nec'ro•log'ic (nĕk'rə-lŏj'ĭk) or nec'ro•log'i•cal adj.
ne•crol'o•gist n.)

What it actually consisted of was a series of fairly lengthy biographies of ‘neglected’ personages who had died in 1797-8. The guy I wanted to read about was duly praised by the anonymous biographer:

Would to heaven that many of those immortal heroes, on whose memory we lavish such high flown eulogiums, had possessed half the virtues, and been degraded by as few vices, as this breeder of cattle!

In my search for sheep poems, I also turned to my shelf full of those anthologies that publishers have sent me. I pulled out one of the Longman volumes because they’re separated into historical periods and I wanted to narrow my search to early-modern poetry. The book is floppy with very thin paper and cover (I guess to make it more light weight and sensual). Inadvertently, the book flipped itself open to the lengthy excerpt from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote. But what was even more interesting to me is that the book which is set up for teaching and learning prints the early-modern text but then follows-up with a ‘resonance’ text to “provide additional context for key works through source readings or responses from a different century or culture." The ‘resonance’ for DQ is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’” -- a story that I’ve read before but totally forgot about! It’s a short text and I HIGHLY recommend that you read it now so that I can, with peace of mind talk about it more!!!