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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.
Further to the point below about my cheap viola being as satisfying to play as the more expensive ones I have tried out -- It seems to be easier to get volume out of it than out of the expensive ones. I reckon the trade-off is that the sound is a little coarser, though my ear is not well-enough trained to distinguish that yet. For the music I play, which is by and large not classical, this is totally acceptable. (Also it could be that if I went one step more expensive, tried playing the $1000 instruments, I would find them to have all the volume of my fiddle plus the smoother sound that I'm postulating the $500 instruments have. This is just guesswork though.)
posted afternoon of February 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
I put Blindness aside a few weeks ago to read The White Castle -- I was getting frustrated by a stretch of plot which seemed monotonous and deadening. Picked it up again the other night and my strategy of backing off and doing something else has paid off well: the book is fresh and surprising again. The scene in which the doctor's wife and the other two women are washing themselves and their clothing in the rain was especially gripping, even climactic.
Perhaps in the building opposite , behind those closed windows some blind people, men, women, roused by the noise of the constant beating of the rain, with their head pressed against the cold window-panes covering with their breath on the glass the dullness of the night, remember the time when, like now, they last saw rain falling from the sky. They cannot imagine that there are moreover three naked women out there, as naked as when they came into the world, they seem to be mad, they must be mad, people in their right mind do not start washing on a balcony exposed to the view of the neighbourhood, even less looking like that, what does it matter that we are all blind, these are things one must not do, my God, how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts, how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs, perhaps we have judged them wrongly or perhaps we are unable to see this the most beautiful and glorious thing that has happened in the history of the city, a sheet of foam flows from the floor of the balcony, if only I could go with it, falling interminably, clean, purified, naked. Only God sees us, said the wife of the first blind man, who, despite disappointments and setbacks, clings to the belief that God is not blind, to which the doctor's wife replied, Not even he, the sky is clouded over...
I also really liked this conversation between the doctor's wife and the writer who is squatting in the apartment of the first blind man and his wife:
...How have you managed since the outbreak of the epidemic, We came out of internment only three days ago, Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them,...
Saramago's practice of referring to his characters by their role in the story rather than by name (I express some skepticism here) pays off big time when he is able to name the stray dog the group adopts (whose first appearance in the story was on the street, licking the tears from the face of the doctor's wife) "The dog of tears" -- this is a beautiful handle for him.
posted evening of February 10th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Blindness
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 Music
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.
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
