This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
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.
I was driving to Home Depot today, and the car behindin front of me was (I'm assuming) driven by an evangelical Christian. The car had several bumper stickers that helped me make this assumption; the one I'm thinking about now said,
This car is washed in the BLOOD of Christ
It was weird -- it looked vaguely like a horror movie promo. (It also made me wonder about transubstantiation occurring in the car wash.)
I was looking through my bookshelf today for something to read, and thinking, I really need something different, a change of pace. Well what caught my eye was the Inferno, which I have been meaning to read for a while -- since 2005, when I bought this translation. I read the book a long time ago, in high school, in a different translation, and maybe again in college; but I think my ear has developed enough since then that I will get a lot out of rereading it now. So here I go!
posted evening of May 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Inferno
This morning Sylvia and I rode our bikes into town to buy bagels for breakfast, and back. I think that is the farthest Sylvia has riddden on her own so far! She was fine for most of it but had trouble with the (gradual, but long) hill up South Orange Ave. from the train station to the bagel shop.
Here is Sylvia baking muffins with her grandmother (2003). And Sylvia's other grandmother, at her birthday party last month.
...My sister, who is herself a mother, passes along a link to this narrative of Mother's Day History.
For your Mother's Day viewing pleasure, The Mothers:
posted morning of May 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
My dad sends along this quote from Fred Palmer, senior vice president for governmental affairs at Peabody Energy (formerly Peabody Coal):
Are there negatives associated? Sure. But 50,000 people die per year in our highway system, and you don't think about that when you get into your car. And you shouldn't.
How exciting! Sylvia and I are going to Brooklyn tomorrow, to see the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. (Sylvia already saw it with Ellen a couple of weeks ago, and wants to go back; I have not seen it yet except in photos.) And! We will be meeting Bill at the museum, whom I have not seen in a year or so; and then having dinner with Dan, whom I have not seen in a lot longer time, I'm thinking about 8 years.
Tonight we watched Crash. It's funny -- it reminded me in certain key ways of Lush Life, which I just finished reading; and my reaction to it was similar to my reaction to that book: it's a pretty gripping, entertaining story as long as you avoid thinking about the deficiencies in the plot and characterizations. If you just watch, don't think: a good movie. (In the end, not nearly as well-done a story as Lush Life, which despite having some similar defects is much more coherent.)
A.O. Scott's review is absolutely spot-on. Here is a nice line: "Metaphor hangs in the California air like smog."
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
You want to know what is a really excellent pasta? Foglio d'Autunno, is what. I bought a bag this evening to go with the dinner I was making for Ellen, and man -- I don't know if I have ever tasted a more pleasant pasta. It's really surprising, since noodles are usually made in regular shapes; these are like little irregular lumps of pasta in different colors. I recommend it.
This recipe was inspired by A White Bear's Cauliflower Pasta Sauce. (For reasons too complicated to explain in this short context, you can log in to AWB's recipe site using as a password, the initial letters of the phrase "Why Must You Be Such A Little Bitch?") I was scanning through the wiki this afternoon looking for a dinner recipe; my eyes kept coming back to that one. Thanks AWB for reminding me of the existence of asiago cheese, which I had somehow forgotten about.
Modified Cauliflower Pasta Sauce
one red onion
garlic
one head of cauliflower
a bit of spinach
grated cheese, asiago or romano
Sauté the onion, garlic and cauliflower in olive oil for a good long time, about half an hour. It's ready when the the cauliflower gets tender and pleasant to bite into. At this point you should put pasta into the water that you have been bringing to a boil.
Add a few handfuls of cheese and the spinach leaves to the pan. As the cheese starts to burn, pour some liquid over it and stir well. (AWB used broth, I used white wine.) Turn the heat down to a simmer.
When the noodles are ready, toss everything together in a bowl and serve.
It's a good dinner, and pretty easy to put together. I was worried when the cheese started burning, that I had done something wrong; but it turns into a really nice brown sauce in the wine.
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Recipes
Question about timeouts on select(): if anyone has ideas about this, please let me know in comments.
Obviously select() is not a real-time operation; if you pass in a 1-second timeout, you cannot assume that you will get to run again in one second, since the operating system is allotting time to all the processes on the machine: in an extremely busy environment, it could be several seconds before you get the processor back. But I'm wondering whether the timeout is 1 second of real time, or 1 second of execution time -- in the very busy environment where your process does not get another time slice for more than a second, would select() continue to wait on the files you passed in until it had waited for a second? Or would it return immediately?
(select() as it is used in this post should be read to mean "select() and poll()," since I'm assuming both API's behave the same in this regard. Who knows, maybe they don't! But that seems unlikely to me.)
1 leek, white and light green parts only, halved lengthwise, rinsed, and thinly sliced into half-moons
½ cup low-salt chicken broth
pinch of crumbled saffron threads
kosher salt
black pepper
¾ lb. monkfish fillet
chopped parsley for garnish
Heat oven to 400° F.
Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and brown on both sides. Add the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add the leeks, broth, saffron, pinch of salt, a couple of grinds of pepper. Bring to a boil.
Rinse the monkfish, pat dry, season with salt and pepper. Place on top of potatoes and drizzle with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Transfer pan to oven and bake until the fish is cooked through, about 15-20 minutes. If potatoes are not ready, take out fish and wrap in foil, until the rest is done. Serve with parsley on top.
The parsley (along with a little bit of oregano) was the first use our new herb garden has seen.
posted evening of May 8th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Projects
I have been following the discussion at The Edge of the American West about using fiction in history curricula with great interest. So it was on my mind this evening as I read Pamuk's essay "Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature" (from Other Colors).
Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish -- without falling prey to vulgarity or parochialism -- the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation -- in Edward Said, for example -- the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalism. But when someone like Fredric Jameson asserts that "Third World literatures serve as national allegories" he is simply expressing a polite indifference to the wealth and complexity of literatures from the marginalized world. Borges wrote his short stories and essays in the 1930s in Argentina -- a Third World country in the classic sense of the term -- but his place at the very center of literature is undisputed.
The essay follows a pattern I have noticed in Pamuk's literary essays: he lays out a great deal of history in a very small space, leaving it to the reader to fill in the elisions. The history here is that of Llosa's relationship with the Existentialists (specifically Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus) and his break with Marxism. Of all this I know nothing besides a very general notion of Llosa as the Peruvian writer who was a radical youth but became quite conservative in his adulthood. (All I have read by the man is The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and that when I was very young.)
But Pamuk sketches the story so well, he gives me a feeling of familiarity with the actors. He makes me wish very strongly to read Death in the Andes:
This novel takes place in the abandoned and disintegrating small towns of the remote Andes -- in empty valleys, mineral beds, mountain roads, and one field that is anything but deserted -- and follows an investigation into a series of disappearances that may be murders.
...
Though Death in the Andes skirts tired modernist hypotheses about the Third World, it is still not a postmodern novel in the manner of, say, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. ...[I]t would be wrong to dismiss it as a coarse statement about inscrutable cultures, for it is a playful and mostly witty realist text about everyday life in Peru: in short, a trustworthy history.
Which last bit I guess is what made me think about Dr. Rauchway's post linked above and the comments thereto.
This morning Sylvia and I rode our bikes into town to buy bagels for breakfast, and back. I think that is the farthest Sylvia has riddden on her own so far! She was fine for most of it but had trouble with the (gradual, but long) hill up South Orange Ave. from the train station to the bagel shop.
last month.
