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.
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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.
Today I read about two movies -- neither one will be coming out for a while yet, but they both sound like something to look forward to.
David Lynch is collaborating with Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son: a "horror-tinged thriller" based on Œdipus Rex. This has every potential to be a fantastic movie; or it could also possibly stink.
Jonathan Demme is going to be directing a biography of Bob Marley, taking over from Martin Scorsese, who is leaving the project. This is just fine with me; I like Marley and I think Demme makes the best movies about music. (Scorsese's are good too, but I prefer Demme's.)
posted afternoon of May 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
My package arrived in the mail today! -- Well it arrived Monday, no-one was home to sign for it; I picked it up at the post office this morning. (WTF? There is now overnight parcel service from Shanghai to New Jersey! This totally boggles my mind. Makes the large sum the seller was charging for postage seem much more reasonable.)
And, well, it seems legit. I have not yet popped a disc in the player to watch it; but all the dvd's are there, and marked as region 0. It weirds me out a little that I can't find any reference to this collection (The Master of Cinema: Werner Herzog Collection) anywhere on the web except for Chinese e-bay auctions. It's a pretty recent collection, includes a movie from 2005. This seems like it might be a signal of piracy but I can't figure out what the incentive is for pirates to produce a 24-dvd collection of Werner Herzog, with obscure titles and professional-looking packaging and everything -- the target audience seems tiny. (Also weirding me out is the inclusion of disc #23, My Best Friend by Patrice Leconte. Which one of these dvds does not belong?)
Well unless somebody convinces me it's unethical, I will be buying more box sets from this seller -- s/he has collections of all the classic directors I'm interested in.
Title list below the fold.
Update: Note if you're thinking about buying this, many of the titles will not play on a US region DVD player -- the seller claims they are region 0 but this is false in many cases. Also some of the discs have screwed-up aspect ratio.
(Note: strange how the editors of the collection translated some of the titles and not others, and a few into French. Not sure what this means.)
Signs of Life (1968)
Audio: English,Dutch Subtitles: English,Chinese
Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (1970)
Audio: English,German Subtitles: German,Chinese
Fata Morgana (1971)
Audio: English,German Subtitles: Chinese
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (1971)
Audio: Dutch Subtitles: English,Chinese
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
Audio: English,German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Herz aus Glas (1976)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Stroszek (1977)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Nosferatu : Phantom der Nacht (1979)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Woyzeck (1979)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Fitzcarraldo 1 (1982)
Audio: English Subtitles: English,French,Chinese
Fitzcarraldo 2 (1982)
Audio: English Subtitles: English,Chinese
(I am assuming this disc is The Burden of Dreams: Making "Fitzcarraldo".)
Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen (1984)
Audio: English Subtitles: German,Chinese
Cobra Verde (1987)
Audio: German Subtitles: English,Chinese
Cerro Torre : Schrei aus Stein (1991)
Audio: English Subtitles: Chinese
Tod für funf Stimmen (1995)
Audio: English Subtitles: Chinese
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
Audio: English Subtitles: Chinese
Invincible (2001)
Audio: English Subtitles: English,Japanese,Chinese
Wheel of Time (2003)
Audio: German Subtitles: Chinese
The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)
Audio: English Subtitles: Chinese
The White Diamond (2005)
Audio: English Subtitles: Chinese
Grizzly Man (2005)
Audio: English Subtitles: English,Spanish,Chinese
Mon meilleur ami (2006)
Audio: English,German Subtitles: English,Chinese (I'm particularly confused about this -- this is a French film by Patrice Leconte. No idea what it's doing here. Well, one idea: that is is holding the place of Klaus Kinski: My Best Fiend, which has a vaguely similar title and which I would expect to see in this collection. But, well, that seems like a poor/incomplete explanation.)
Rescue Dawn (2007)
Audio: English Subtitles: English,Spanish,Chinese
Ellen made this salad for dinner last night, and it was very tasty. She remembered it from a Greek restaurant she ate at when she and Sylvia were in D.C.
Watermelon and mint salad
Watermelon, cut into bite-size chunks
Bucheron, cut into small pieces (the restaurant used feta cheese; Ellen used bucheron because it was on hand. I think the goat cheese was great.)
Scallions, chopped thin
Kalamata olives, pitted and cut in half
Fresh mint leaves
Mix everything together in a bowl and serve. The juice from the melon will combine with the cheese to make a fabulous dressing.
posted morning of May 20th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Recipes
Woo-hoo! Robyn Hitchcock is doing a tour of the northeastern US in July; and on Saturday the 12th he will be playing at The Blend* in Ridgewood, not far from here. And I will be there watching him. Other dates:
July 9th: The Iron Horse, Northampton, MA
July 10th: The Linda (WAMC Performing Arts Center), Albany, NY
July 11th: Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansett, NY
July 13th: John & Peter's, New Hope, PA (Hmm: maybe I could go to this show as well.)
All I have at this point is the background; I think a good, science-fictiony story could be written with this background but I don't have characters or events yet. A method of memory-enhancement has been developed, I think a genetic-modification method, that leads to a world in which people do not forget anything. However people want to forget a lot of their painful and traumatic memories. So: a method of memory transfer has been developed (note the passive voice: this story is not about these developments, they have already happened in the past), which can move memories between hosts. The memories cannot be deleted -- what is a memory without a host?
A new profession springs up of "bearer of unwanted memories". Practitioners are reviled, kind of similar to how our society looks at prostitutes. People with no other way of making money sell their services at memory-transfer labs. The affluent visit these dens of ill repute to rid themselves of memories of rape, shame, abuse, criminality. The story is about one of these memory hosts and how he gets through the day with all the ghosts in his head.
Our irises are blossoming this year! Last year the plants grew but produced no flowers. The bulbsrhizomes are from The Presby Memorial Iris Gardens in Montclair, where you can get a mixed grab bag during bloom season for cheap.
posted morning of May 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The garden
Last night I was reading Thomas Pynchon's new novel (!), Stockton (!!), out loud to Sylvia (!!!). Alas I cannot remember any of the content. The curious thing about the book was that it had these metallic spinners embedded in it with a word or words on each side; but no explicit direction for how to use them. The reader needed to experiment with each one as he came to it, and see how its words could be integrated into the surrounding text. The largest of these spinners contained the entire final sentence of the book, with several possible ways of constructing it.
posted morning of May 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
...That's why we call it by that name. Today in history:
1152
Nuptials of cousins Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine are celebrated. (Their anniversary is shared by blogger Kevin Drum and his wife, who are not however cousins or nobility.)
1593
An arrest warrant is issued for Christopher Marlowe, on charges of heresy. Marlowe will soon be dead.
1652
Rhode Island declares slavery illegal. It is the first American colony to do so.
1876
Wyatt Earp starts his new job as assistant marshall in Dodge City, KS.
1969
Apollo 10 is launched.
1970
Jeremy Osner is born, in Berkeley, CA. He will go on to create a blog for notes on his reading and his music, and generally worry too much about everything he does.
1992
The 27th Amendment, generally acknowledged to be the least interesting amendment, becomes a part of the U.S. Constitution.
Having some friends over tomorrow, that will be fun. Except it's going to rain, grumble grumble.
...A lovely party it was! and Jupiter smiled on us -- after a brief heavy rain in the afternoon, it didn't rain at all, even cleared up a little. The barbecue was tasty and Redfox's onion jam was the perfect relish.
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
(Žižek is speaking of the choice offered, in The Matrix [and note, I haven't seen that movie], between a blue pill that will make the protagonist wake up to reality and a red pill that will bring him into the fantasy permanently):
But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions; but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill, which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive... not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.
...Also, a really nice digression in the fourth segment, about movie characters grappling with "the autonomous undead object" -- the red shoes, Dr. Strangelove's right hand, the ventriloquist's dummy in Dead of Night. "The lesson is clear: the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object, is to become this object."
