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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 realized a difference between my guitar playing and my fiddling while I was practicing today -- I approach the guitar from a framework of the music's structure, where I just go with the feel of it on violin. I don't have much clue of what measure I'm playing or often even where the beat is, when I'm playing melody on violin. This is a major shortcoming; and yet I believe I am a much better violinist than I am a guitarist. I am the same with singing -- I think I can sing pretty well, but I don't understand what is happening with the structure of the melody I'm singing. Something to work on -- I would like to be able to understand (and to feel) the chord changes going on under the melody.
posted evening of October 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Guitar
Tonight we're watching Independent Lens' Chicago 10, a dramatization of the 1968 Democratic convention and the Chicago 7 trial. It's very well done, I recommend watching it -- Channel 13 is airing it again tomorrow night.
posted evening of October 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Nixonland
Saramago posts today about current abuse of Judge Baltasar Garzón, asking "Do executioners have a soul?" It is a long post and beyond my limited translating ability; but it did get me to look up Garzón and find out what the context is.
Garzón has ordered exhumation of a number of mass graves containing the bodies of people slaughtered by the fascist militias during the Spanish Civil War, and has furthermore declared that these massacres were crimes against humanity and thus prosecutable -- his conservative critics reply that the war crimes are covered by an amnesty that was declared "during the transition", which I think refers to the transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy. I guess declaring something a crime against humanity would supercede a declared amnesty.
Barbara Ehrenreich [Oh my gosh! Barbara Ehrenreich has a blog!! It's close to a year old.] explains the Socialist International Conspiracy to destroy the economy.
Things were going swimmingly until about a week ago, when the capitalists suddenly staged a counter-coup. We had thought that the nationalization of the banks would bring capitalism to its knees, but instead, the capitalists were craftily using it to privatize the government. ...
Ah well, we socialists still have the election to look forward to. After months of studying the candidates' economic plans, we have determined that one of them, and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses John McCain!
At The Fiddler's Companion, I found another Napoleon-themed Irish reel: "Napoleon Crossing the Alps". I've been playing it this morning and have uploaded the music in PDF format. I am curious what it means that the key signature is one sharp, but the tune resolves to A -- is this some kind of wacky modal thing? Also weird: The source at Fiddler's Companion has an accidental sharp marked at every occurrence of F♯, which seems redundant and makes the music difficult to read. I removed the accidentals.I was thinking it might be possible to make a medley of "Napoleon Crossing the Rhine" with this; but I'm not sure what kind of transposing I should do or alternately, how to modulate between the two.
Update: My mom (who knows about such things) says, this is Dorian mode:
A tune can be built (and resolve) around any of the notes in the
scale - this is modal writing. The mode that resolves to the 1st
note of the scale is what we call major. The one that resolves to the
6th note is what we call minor. the one that resolves to the second
tone of the (major) scale is called dorian. This modal writing is
used a lot in traditional tunes.
You can get the idea of the sound by playing a scale using only white
notes. First play c-c, that's ionian (major). Then play d-d,
that's dorian. e-e is phrygian , f-f is lydian, g-g is mixolydian. a-a
is æolian (minor), and b-b is locrian.
(Edited with some suggestions from my brother, who also wants to point out that ionian and æolian modes are Not Really major and minor, because tonal music is different from modal music. My sister wanted to point out in this regard that "we have the nerdiest family EVER.")
posted morning of October 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Songs
Well obviously not... But it seems to me like there could be a silver lining in the dark cloud that is McCain's campaign tactics of racist innuendo -- if Obama wins (as I am expecting and hoping he will), it will be a pretty significant bit of evidence that racist attacks have lost their appeal with the American electorate -- or that the portion of the electorate they appeal to has shrunk into insignificance.
I've been messing around further with Napoleon Crossing the Rhine; here it is with "Bonaparte's Retreat" added as a chorus. Big jam at Menzel Violins this afternoon, maybe I will lead this tune.
posted morning of October 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
I wasn't buying as a book collector would, but as a frantic person who was desperate to understand why Turkey was so poor and so troubled.
Pamuk's essay in today's Guardian reminds me a lot of his essays in Part II of Other Colors, "Books and Reading." He talks about reading and imitating the first and second waves of 20th-century Turkish poets, and how that poetry (and the repression of those poets) affected his thinking and his voice.
The second half of the essay however moves into different territory, questions about Turkey's status as a nation and in relation to the West -- this is material that he has written a lot about, much of it collected in the subsequent section of Other Colors, "Politics, Europe, and Other Problems of Being Oneself." The transition -- the sentence I have quoted above -- is a bit of genius, a summary in 26 words of a huge portion of Pamuk's writing and thinking -- there are whole volumes of worthwhile memoir that can be extrapolated from this sentence.
A lovely essay -- go read it! But Ms. Freely: "exalt" does not mean the same thing as "exult". (Apologies if this error is down to the editors rather than the translator.)
I have added an entry for this essay to the Pamuk bibliography I'm maintaining. If you see any other articles that would fit in well there, let me know.
posted morning of October 18th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
I just heard Chris Kofinis on Keith Olbermann's show, saying that this election year could see a realignment similar to that of 1980. Could this be? It seems like in 1980 (from my loose memory of the Reagan years), people who had previously identified themselves as "liberal" or as "Democrats" started thinking of themselves as "conservative" and as "Republicans". Will voting for Obama make people start thinking of themselves as "Democrats" going forward?
Vance writes about the photography of Charles Van Schaik, and links to an archive of his pictures of “poverty, failure, vandalism, arson, domestic violence, disease, depression, alcoholism, insanity, suicide, and murder” in rural Wisconsin. In comments, Michael Lesy links his essay on "Visual Literacy".
