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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I'm starting to use my new mixing program, Audacity. In the spirit of audacity, I'll post a working version of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning". Not satisfied with much of this but I think some individual bits work very well. My laptop's microphone captures my fiddle surprisingly well; I think for further vocal work I am going to need to get a microphone. And a better sense of rhythm -- it's surprisingly difficult to figure out where to come in when you are listening to a track you laid down previously.
posted evening of December 21st, 2007: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Songs
I need to come up with more descriptive titles than "Melody 1", "Melody 2" and so forth for the tunes I come up with. Sylvia suggests that the most recent one be called "Sandwich Song", and so it shall be.
posted evening of December 21st, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Ooh, I never got to do this before! -- being catless and all. My dad sends along this picture of a stray the animal control people brought into his office. (He is a consultant for the city government.)
I worked out a little melody on my viola this evening, and wrote it down! Thanks to the magic of ABC Notation, I can make it available here, in ABC format or PDF. I used ABCEdit to enter it, and boy is that useful -- I had thought the 3-note runs were triplets but ABCEdit's playback feature showed me that was wrong, and that I wanted two short notes and a longer one.
You can repeat the verse many times, there are a lot of rhythmic variations and note-order variations that are pretty easy to find. Also I think there was a bridge when I was playing but I could not find it when I was writing the tune down.
Update: Ok, I expanded it a little, found a part that sounds kind of like a bridge. Again, to make this sound at all interesting when you're playing it you will need to add in a lot of variations on your own.
Another fun thing about ABCEdit is it makes it pretty easy to play around with the time signature and stuff. I tried this out in 12/8, with a sort of swingy feel -- it sounds really corny that way.
posted evening of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So I have a week off coming up! Fun. My hope is that I won't let the time hang heavy on my hands, that I will do stuff and be engaged. Towards that end here is a list of some of the things I want to do with my free time:
Exercise! A perennial New Year's resolution is to be more physically active; this year it's pretty urgent that I devote some attention to that. I've been feeling more and more like a slug over the past couple of months. So: go to the gym daily, ride my bike if it is not too cold. Get Ellen to come along with me.
Practice my violin. Goes without saying, but regardless, I want to spend some serious time on that. Maybe do some recording with my great new software. (I've come up with a fiddle arrangement of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" that I think sounds really nice.) I should call Jerry (and Neal) and see if they have any free time next week.
Walks with Ellen and Sylvia. There should be some nice weather (I hope!) and it's pleasant just walking around.
Reading and blogging, of course.
posted afternoon of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fitness
Meredith Sue Willis has a blog! (Found via South Orange Journal's list of links.) One without permalinks, which I haven't seen much of lately. But if you scroll down to December 12 you will see she is recommending José Saramago's Blindness. This is good timing because I had been looking for a book to read, Blindness was on my list but forgotten, I think now is a good time to find a copy and read it.
posted afternoon of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Blindness
The opening pages of Absalom, Absalom! are great pages. I was trying today to figure out what I could compare them to: they are sort of like a really long shot in film of a scene with very little action or dialogue, with the camera panning and tracking its subjects, taking in every detail of an elaborate set. But what this scenario really brings to mind is the reaction I am always hoping to have (and only rarely actually experiencing) to seeing a great painting. Faulkner is narrating the experience of looking hard, for minutes on end, at a painting of the scene he is describing.
(Also: my memory of this book doesn't have much to say about Quentin Compson; but rereading these opening pages, I am thinking he's a really important element to understanding what's being told. I wonder if after the beginning of the book, Faulkner moves more completely into the world of Miss Coldfield's story. Or alternately if I just missed out on the point of the story, when I read it last.)
Further to yesterday's post: I think I've found the best of all configurations, which is to have the shoulder rest on the violin and no chin rest. The sound is lovely and it feels completely natural to hold it this way -- easier to hold than it ever was with the chin rest on, shoulder rest or no. My head leans down so that my jaw is holding the violin completely steady, and my ear is right next to the sound box.
Still not totally sure what to do about the pickup. I might mount it again, but on the right side of the instrument. Might seek out a new, lighter weight pickup. Might just learn how to play with a microphone.
