The Life Quixotic | Charles Foran
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/21/193210
“Miguel de Cervantes published the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first volume had granted the sixty-eight-year-old Spaniard unexpected late-career success, and a year after the appearance of the counterfeit Part II. A failed playwright, he appears to have dashed off both parts of his masterpiece in a hurry, anxious to counter his imitators and return to what he believed was his serious work. In his haste, Cervantes allowed his imagination to wander so far and wide from existing prose genres?the pastoral tale and chivalric romance being the most popular at the time?that he ended up in an entirely new form. Today we call that form the modern novel, and credit him with its invention. The author himself died in 1616, his hopes for immortality pinned to a pastoral adventure titled Persiles y Sigismunda. It is said to deserve its obscurity. […]That might be so. But it might also be the case that four centuries after the birth of the novel?a spectacular birth it was, too, like delivering an eighty-kilogram baby with a wicked sense of humour and a Mensa IQ?the majority of us hardly recognize the form innovated by Cervantes in the fictions we currently admire. The anniversary offers a chance to revisit the enchantments of Don Quixote and also to wonder about the state of enchantment in the literature of our own age.”

Da Vinci studio find thrills art lovers, experts | CTV.ca News Staff
http://tinyurl.com/8qcn3
“Art lovers, historians and experts around the world are marveling at news Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop may have been found in Florence. Italian researchers uncovered the room in a building just off the Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in the central part of the celebrated city.”NOTE: with links to video reports