The READIN Family Album
Me and Sylvia on the canal in Qibao (April 2011)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

The very idea of the (definitive) translation is misguided, Borges tells us; there are only drafts, approximations.

Andrew Hurley


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Monday, September 6th, 2010

🦋 Mountain Station on the radio

John and I have our first track playing on the radio! Tune in to Henry Musikar's always-great music rotation at KCUF and you will (every so often) hear our cover of Gillian Welch's "Revelator." Here is the track if you don't want to wait:

posted afternoon of September 6th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, September 5th, 2010

🦋 Beat

53 years ago, on September 5th, 1957, Jack Kerouac published On the Road -- by the time I came along to get my bit of inspiration from it, the book had become a key piece of history and of national consciousness already; imagine what a thing it must have been in 1957! Here is Jack on the Steve Allen Show in 1959, answering some questions, speaking about Dean, reading the final paragraph of his book:

posted afternoon of September 5th, 2010: 2 responses
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🦋 Sweet Virginia


Armaments in Alexandria
We spent a few days in Virginia this past week, our end-of-summer vacation. Some pictures from our travels are at the Family Album.

posted morning of September 5th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

🦋 The experience of deafness and blindness: 3 takes

Fini Straubinger:

Saramago (in Pontiero's translation):

The blind man had categorically stated that he could see, if you'll excuse that verb again, a thick, uniform white color, as if he had plunged his eyes into a milky sea. A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological possibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms, and colors of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colors, forms and images which reality itself might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.
Borges (and guess how excited I am to find the Seven Nights lectures online! At least one of them...):

posted evening of August 31st, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Life is...

At Cat and Girl, Dorothy offers some Metaphors, Cheap! Plus, for only slightly more money than the metaphors, you can purchase Volume III of Cat and Girl's (and Grrl's, and Boy's, and Bad Decision Dinosaur's) insights. Order now and get your copy personalized.

(And on the webcomix tip, today's Scenes from a Multiverse is hilarious and a bit Borgesian, if you read it the right way.)

posted morning of August 31st, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, August 29th, 2010

🦋 Trespass

Marc at the Wooster Collective announces a new collaborative book on urban art, Trespass: a History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. You can leaf through a sample of the book at Taschen.

Update: The launch party is Tuesday evening, September 28th, in Soho.

posted evening of August 29th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The Hard Way

This is not to say that the point of the hard way is that we must be heroic. The attitude of "heroism" is based upon the assumption that we are bad, impure, that we are not worthy, are not ready for spiritual understanding. We must reform ourselves, be different from what we are. For instance, if we are middle class Americans, we must give up our jobs or drop our of college, move out of our suburban homes, let our hair grow, perhaps try drugs. If we are hippies, we must give up drugs, cut our hair short, throw away our torn jeans. We think that we are special, that we are turning away from temptation. We become vegetarians and we become this and that. There are so many things to become. We think our path is spiritual because it is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego.

-- Chögyam Trungpa,
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism

posted afternoon of August 29th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, August 26th, 2010

🦋 Early Color

Some stunning shots of Russia and its people, from the first decade of the 20th Century, at boston.com's Big Picture. The photographer is Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii:

Prokudin-Gorskii riding on the Murmansk rail outside Petrozavodsk: 1910

The pictures were taken before the advent of color film, using three exposures through different filters -- this absolutely blows me away. The Library of Congress has more information about Prokudin-Gorskii's method.

(Also: Gizmodo has some of the very earliest color motion pictures, from 1922!)

posted evening of August 26th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Big Bugs

pulex irritans: photo by Steve Gschmeissner

In today's Telegraph, a photo gallery of arthropoda at outlandish magnifications.

posted evening of August 26th, 2010: Respond

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

🦋 Fuzzy Felt

A new Moomin movie has come out! Well -- "new" needs a little qualification here; the movie is compiled clips from the Fuzzy Felt Moomins TV show of the '70's, with new voices and soundtrack (featuring Björk). It came out in Finland a few weeks ago, and the production company says it will be distributed internationally... I can only hope it will be in theaters here sometime this fall. (The same company released a Moominsummer Madness movie a couple of years ago, which I did not hear a word about. But they seem to have ramped up a good deal more publicity for this one.)

posted evening of August 24th, 2010: Respond
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