Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
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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.
In this autumn of 2011, the peak concert experiences are coming fast and furious. Last night John and I went out to Union Hall in Brooklyn, the basement of which contains about the nicest performance space of its size that I can remember being in, to see Jeffrey Foucault and Mark Erelli touring their new album, Seven Curses. We showed up about a half hour early and got a chance to mingle with the other concert-goers, a lovely crowd of folkies, chat about the music, the weather, the neighborhood... talked up Mountain Station to a couple of people who seemed receptive...
Jeff came on stage looking like Ulysses S. Grant with a Gibson J-45 and Mark picked up his mandolin; sat down about ten feet away from us. After a little loose strumming and tuning up they broke into a clear, insistent rhythm, chords ringing out, sweeping us away. The two sets were a mix of covers and originals from both artists, tracks from the new record and from their back catalogs, murder ballads and love songs -- one particularly charming moment in the second set came when a man from the audience called out a request for Dylan's "Shooting Star" -- Erelli knew it, Foucault said he could figure it out, and (after a brief debate over whether they should play Bad Company's "Shooting Star" instead) the two of them improvised a rocking cover version on the spot.
posted morning of December third, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Gig Notes
Our old dog, Lola, is at the very end of her days. She has been elderly for a long time now -- she is 19 years old, she's been blind for a couple of years and recently has only been able to walk in circles. Her health has taken a real turn for the worse in the past couple of days, and today (at Ellen's behest) we started talking about euthanasia.
This evening Sylvia and I picked out some wood for a coffin and started measuring and cutting.
posted evening of December first, 2011: 2 responses
The more I read from Quim Font's monologues, the more I like him. He is beginning to remind me of Amadeo Salvatierra, who I think is the only other narrator in the same age bracket... The two are not at all the same person, but they share a few endearing mannerisms.
Brandon Holmquest's analysis of the practice of translating poetry is well worth reading. Holmquest translates Borges' poem "El general Quiroga va en coche al muere" and examines closely the decisions he is making at each juncture.
posted morning of November 28th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
It is good to know that Pieldivina's death in Savage Detectives is not part of the historical infrastructure of the book -- that he is alive and "in fact did not die a singularly depressing death of a brain tumor." He is (to my ear) a fantastic sculptor of syllables -- check out his poem "Tell them who you are", in both English (Brandon Holmquest's able rendering) and Spanish at that link.
Todo habÃa empezado, según Piel Divina, con una viaje que Lima y su amigo Belano hicieron al norte, a principios de 1976.
— Luis Sebastián Rosado March, 1983
Piel Divina, homeless poet in Mexico City, puts together a paranoid narrative in which Lima has been pursued by some nameless, evil organization since the trip to Sonora; that his disappearance in Managua is part of his flight from the organization. Interesting... This is the approximate halfway point of the book, and we see Piel Divina putting himself forward as a detective. I had been thinking of the "savage detectives" as being Belano and Lima searching for Cesárea Tinajero; but this works too, and it makes the reader also into a savage detective, one on the trail of the visceral realists.
The concept of
Impermanence manifests itself frequently enough in Buddhist philosophy. It asserts that life "is like a dream, just like a dream. Completely hallucinatory -- like lightning -- of a transitory nature. Lightning brings with it an explosion of light and disappears immediately. That's how things are, that's life."*
Since I laid eyes on this house I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Its beauty is incredible, in spite of its state of deterioration.
Passing by, the years have softened the memories: the laughter of children in its hallways, the extraordinary aromas that would come from the kitchen when grandma was cooking, grandpa's old Victrola, which played before the lovely parties they threw in their spacious main hall; the southern songbirds which filled the house and its grounds with such beautiful tones, which cheered them up.
None of this exists any longer. It's just the memories and ghosts that remain to live there. The house is a mute testament to those parties, which once filled those old walls of brick and adobe.
If anyone is interested in knowing -- it's in San Francisco Javier de Lezama, in Guárico, Venezuela. A bit closer down to where the wind comes from.
*The words enclosed in quotation marks above, concerning life and "impermanence", are by the Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche, who spoke them in Kuala Lumpur, Malasia, in February, 2002.
posted evening of November 26th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
