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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.
This afternoon we all three went over to Menzel Violins to hear Kathy Chiavola play music from her recent and forthcoming records. What a voice she has! I bought her record The Harvest, looking forward to listening to that; also looking forward to her next record which will include her "Ghost of the Wild Mississippi", one of the loveliest evironmentalist songs I can think of.
On her second set, she asked for musicians to back her up. I volunteered (with some urging from Sylvia) and ended up playing one of Mo's violas (a $500 instrument which served to reinforce my happiness with my cheap model -- not that it was difficult to play or anything but the sound was not noticeably better) with Carl Croce (a distant relative of Jim) on guitar and Dan O'Dea on fiddle. We played on the last three songs -- I was sorry to miss much of the set, backstage. I'm definitely going to start taking lessons with Dan, I got a good sense of what he would be like as a teacher.
Another fun fiddle experience this weekend: yesterday we went to a Chinese New Year celebration, where a man was playing èrhú. There were a couple of violinists hovering round asking him to explain the instrument, and he invited us to give it a try. I did and was able to produce a pretty convincing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".
二胡
posted evening of February 10th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Amazing, amazing poem by Cameron Penny, who is a fourth grade student in Detroit:
If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies
And when the soldiers look into the window
They don't see their enemies
They see themselves as children
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep
When they wake up, the land is well again.
Printed here. (And it looks like it originally appeared in 2005's Voices in Wartime: The Anthology - A Collection of Narratives and Poems.) Thanks Dad, for sending this along.
Going to an open jam tonight at Mo Fiddles -- the second one this year, the first I am going to. Really nice -- my last regular jam was the one Citizen Kafka organized in Chinatown, many years back now and before I had even picked up my violin. I'm so happy there is one going on around here.
Such a great evening. Met lots of people I could hit it off with, including Dan of Dan's Bands who knows of a bunch of other bluegrass and old-time jams in the area. So much fun.
posted evening of February 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
A bit of (decidedly NSFW) bluegrass gospel from
John R. Butler:
(Thanks to Gabe for the link.) And whaddaya know -- Bad Gods is updated today (well sometime in the couple of weeks since I last checked anyway), with a most appropriate image:
But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else.
I have enjoyed the self-referential and pedantic qualities of The White Castle and have found ways to apply its lessons to my own mind; but in the end I don't think it quite works. Pamuk says what he is doing too often and too plainly for it generally to surprise; the lesson becomes dull through repetition. I find myself longing for humanity in the characters.
The narrator's assertion at the end of his story that some mystery remains in its pages, one which "intelligent readers" will seek out and devour, isn't really enough to recapture my attention -- it comes off as sort of patronizing. I am going to consider this book a piece from Pamuk's apprenticeship and treasure it more for the glimpses I can catch of his later work, than for the book itself.
...is that I feel more comfortable in my body while doing yoga than I do in general. I think this may also be true of exercising on the elliptical machine, and sort of true of exercise in general.
posted evening of February 5th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fitness
Further to the Codex Seraphinianus: Luigi Serafini also wrote a second book, the Pulcinellopedia (Piccola), concerning the Punch doll of "Punch and Judy". I have only been able to find a few scattered images, mostly on this page (the same blogger also has a beautiful Codex page) -- sure looks intriguing.
The two shows I downloaded last night are indeed great music; I am tentatively liking the 1996 show better than the 2008 show, which I have however not yet listened to all of.** If anyone would like a link to the 96* show files, drop me a line.
Only The Stones Remain (by the Soft Boys, I think only released as a single)
*Not that there are 96 of them, I mean they're from that year. **After listening to more: Yes, the 96 gig is the better -- It actually adds something to the music over what is published on the albums, where the 2008 show is beautiful but not in a much different or superior way from I Often Dream of Trains.
posted evening of February first, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Gig Notes
