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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.
Remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about it not really being that hot? That is no longer operative; it's really brutal, and has been for a couple of days now. But! Supposed to break tonight! And sure enough the rain is pouring down. Hopefully the latter half of this week will be a little more acceptable.
...And yes, it's much more bearable now temperature-wise. Still humid though. We had a really massive storm last night that brought down trees on people's cars and houses in the area -- our immediate neighborhood seems to have been pretty well spared.
The high walls that enclose the cold mosque courtyard are made from massive stones that are blackened with age but undiminished; the icy funeral stone chills a person just to look at it... It is as if this courtyard -- these colossal stones, these giant walls -- existed for no other purpose than to make a person feel helpless and bereft.
-- Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother
I had been wondering, since I first read about this book, what the form of the memoir would be. It appears it will be shifting back and forth between Çetin's adult life and her childhood, and her grandmother's childhood -- this works very well, at least the amount of it I've read thus far.
Today I (whose reading material is almost entirely novels) bought two works of non-fiction to occupy myself with in the coming weeks. The first, which I'm reading this evening, is Fethiye Çetin's My Grandmother: A Memoir; when I finish this I will embark on Rick Perlstein's considerably more voluminous Nixonland.
I was attracted to Çetin's memoir (besides by the Maureen Freely association) because I want to learn more about the genocide in Armenia. I have always had a vague notion of it as a historical event but no real sense of how it had happened or what its repercussions had been. It seems to me (though this could just be because I have been paying more attention to Turkey since I got interested in Pamuk) like it is getting more discussion in recent years than it did, say, ten years ago -- Freely's introduction* seems to bear that out.
Freely gives a very concise history of the events in Armenia (which to my surprise, does not refer in this context to the small former SSR by that name, but to a large portion of the modern country of Turkey.) She also speaks briefly about how Çetin came to write this memoir, and about contemporary clashes between Turkish nationalists and people who have attempted to air the story of these events. She does not mention whether Çetin herself has been a target; I hope she has not.
The only historical events I have much of a handle on that seem analogous to the genocide in Armenia, are the genocides committed against the native peoples of America. I wonder if that is a productive avenue of thinking -- maybe I will float it by the Edge of the West folks.
*Something I am curious about -- Freely mentions the author several times in the introduction, and always by her full name, never an honorific plus last name, or last name alone. This sounds kind of awkward to my ears and I'm wondering if it's something to do with Turkish custom. Anybody know?
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
So I might well be heading in to the city Friday night, to see Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, at the Flim Forum. If you'd be interested to see it then, drop me a line.
So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here.
Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on.
So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Nixonland
A beautiful but flawed movie, I think -- the flaw is in the plot, which is not interesting enough to keep me in my seat for 2½ hours. The beauty is (of course) to be found in the dancing, but this brings up a question for me: why is the main ballet sequence shot with special effects that could not happen on stage?
Filming stage presentations seems to me like a great idea; I really like e.g. what Bergman did with it in The Magic Flute. When Craster is conducting the overture and the camera is showing the confusion backstage, that was what I thought was going to happen -- self-aware cinematography of the company's presentation of The Red Shoes. Instead I got a fantasia of what the ballet might look like in a movie, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Is this a depiction of what is going on in the dancers' heads? In the audience's head? In the director's head? It's definitely not what's going on on stage and I think that takes away from the movie.
posted evening of June 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Werner Herzog's latest movie, a documentary of Antarctica called Encounters at the End of the World, will be opening at the Film Forum next Wednesday. Leonard Lopate interviewed Herzog on his WNYC show yesterday:
Update: A harsh (in a believable way) pan from David Meyer of the Brooklyn Rail. "Grandpa came to town, found what amused and repelled him and looked no further." I'm still looking forward to seeing the movie, but with some caveats now.
Today Mr. Pamuk turns 56 years old. (And it has been nearly a year since I first started reading his books.) I wish him a long and happy life of writing.
posted morning of June 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
Wilted spinach salad is one of my old favorites. Tonight, I figured out how to make it without bacon, since Ellen and I are trying to limit slightly, how much fat we are eating. The figs have a similar flavor profile -- sweet and smoky. The mushrooms give a meaty texture.
Vegetarian Spinach Salad
Serves 2
about ½ lb. baby spinach leaves, picked, washed, and dried
a bunch of scallions, washed and chopped
5 dried figs, chopped small (fresh figs would probably be good too)
6 mushroom caps, cut into quarters
olive oil
sherry vinegar*
balsamic vinegar
grated pecorino romano
Combine spinach, scallions and figs in a salad bowl.
Heat oil in a heavy skillet; when hot, add mushroom caps. Season with salt and pepper and saute a minute or two.
Pour vinegar into pan -- about one part sherry vinegar to two parts balsamic to six parts oil. Quickly remove from heat and pour over salad. Toss salad up into skillet so that it gets warm and wilted.
Top with grated cheese.
This makes a very nice, light dinner served with bread and cheese and red wine.
*(I had some sherry vinegar on hand from when I was making Redfox's Onion Jam recipe -- so I thought I'd use it. It seemed to give a very nice flavor in this dressing, though I can't think of any other salad where it would really be appropriate. It's not an ingredient I'm really familiar with.)
posted evening of June 6th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Recipes
Thanks, Shelley! Shelley came along to Sylvia's dance recital last month (Sylvia is a student at Lydia Johnson Dance) and took a lot of pictures, which she gave to Ellen today -- I've uploaded them to our family album.
Sylvia's dance was with two other girls (all of them wore baseball caps for the dance) -- the three of them choreographed the moves together.
