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Although I have done it all these thirty years or more, although I live my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, still I think that there are few activities so worthy of inspection as the reading of novels.

— Juan Gabriel Várgas


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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.

🦋 Mussorgsky

More animation from Alexeïeff and Parker! I found a compilation of all their pinboard cartoons. The listing:

  • 0:00 Night on bald mountain (1933) -- Just extraordinary. 7 years ahead of Walt Disney. Look at the metamorphosis about 1:40 in...
  • 8:22 Parade des Sools (1936) -- Hats! and lots of 'em. (IMDB oddly has this piece listed as "Parade des Chapeaux" -- this accurately describes the piece but it is not the title.) Possibly Chapeaux Sools is a hat company, and this an advertisement for them?
  • 9:38 Etoiles Nouvelles (1937) -- commercial for Davros Nouvelle Egyptian size cigarettes
  • 11:04 Chants Populaires (1944) -- "Alouette" w/still image
  • 11:42 En Passant (1943) -- bucolic scene, terrifying squirrels
  • 13:04 Fumées (1952) -- smoke rings. Looks like a commercial for a brand of pipe tobacco called V.E.?
  • 14:25 Les Rimes (1954) -- entertaining Brun Lune biscuit commercial
  • 15:23 Pure Beauté (1954) -- soap commercial (Monsavon brand) / meditation on the female nude
  • 16:25 La Sève de la Terre (1955) -- Esso commercial? -- totally psychedelic
  • 18:26 Automation (1960) -- Renault commercial; boring/technically impressive
  • 20:12 The Nose (1963)
  • 31:33 Pictures at an Exhibition (1972) -- with a spoken introduction in English
  • 42:25 Three Moods (1980)
I'm kind of taken with how Mussorgsky pieces bookend their career. It's interesting that all of their commercial pieces have titles and credits.

posted evening of Thursday, October first, 2009
➳ More posts about Animation
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Musorgsky is one of my favorites and I've written a long, still unfinished piece on him. The part I haven't written is the most interesting -- the theory of history and of the State found in his two big operas. Musorgsky (like Gogol) was quite a serious student of Russian history.

posted evening of October first, 2009 by John Emerson

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What's of interest:

➪ Best commentary yet on the The Millions list comes from Alvy Singer, who asks, "What sort of list, using terms so hyperbolic, so spectacular -- OF THE MILLENIUM!! -- can be afforded the luxury of including not a single book which has not yet been translated into English?" He suggests the list be called, "The Greatest Fiction of the Millenium Published in English, Taking for Granted that the Rest can be Abstracted Until It Is Translated to English."
➪ Fred Clarke, the Slacktivist, examines the book of Jonah as "an explicit challenge to and rejection of an exclusive, vengeful perspective found elsewhere in scripture."
➪ At Harper's, Gideon Lewis-Kraus profiles a few of the "great many people who might in another era have cared about illegal foreign wars or grave threats to civil liberties[, but who] had been outraged into apathy by the unrelenting malevolent ineptitude of their government."
(Other links of interest at my Google+ page. It's recommended!)

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