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.
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.
These tickets have been burning a hole in my pocket for a couple of weeks now -- tonight Ellen and I are going up to Ridgewood, to listen to Robyn Hitchcock! I'll be wandering around in an expectant haze all day, more than I usually am I mean. The venue is a place called Blend -- looks like a good place to hear music.
Mostly I'm excited about going to a concert with Ellen, which we have not done together in too long a time.
posted morning of July 12th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Yesterday I was browsing around the webs for reactions to The Cave, and found this lovely essay by Scott Esposito. Turns out it's part of Esposito's blog Conversational Reading, which appears to be composed exclusively of well-written, well-reasoned reflections on literature and on Esposito's current reading. A-and that's not all! He also edits a web zine called The Quarterly Conversation. Current issue has (among other good things) a review of Vonnegut's posthumous collection Armageddon in Retrospect and an essay about Macedonio Fernández, mentor to Borges.
posted morning of July 12th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Cave
...And no sooner do I post about how glad I am to see the dog in this story, than I read a chapter narrated mostly from Found's point of view. It is very sweetly done, too.
Doubtless because he was still green in years, Found had not yet had time to gain clear, definitive, formed opinions on the importance or meaning of tears in the human being, however, considering that these liquid humors are frequently manifest in the strange soup of sentiment, reason and cruelty of which the said human being is made, he thought it might not be such a grave mistake to go over to his weeping mistress and gently place his head on her knees. ...From this moment on, Marta will love the dog Found as much as we know Cipriano already loves him.
Just a note: I'm so happy to see there is a dog as one of the characters in The Cave: the Dog of Tears was a huge piece of Blindness and of Seeing, and I'm glad to see Saramago including a dog in his cast here as well.
posted evening of July 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Saramago is very clearly conscious of what he is doing with our clichés, what I was talking about yesterday:
Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.
He may be permitted one more. He uncovers the veins of meaning over which these phrases have calcified.
I just found a interesting article by Margaret Jull Costa, who is Saramago's translator, on Translating Pessoa, with an exercise in translating a passage from his Book of Disquiet.
That was when Cipriano Algor said, Don't worry, we'll get there on time, I'm not worried, replied his son-in-law, only just managing to conceal his anxiety, Of course you're not, but you know what I mean, said Cipriano Algor. ...
Cipriano Algor started up the van. He had got distracted by the buildings under demolition and now wanted to make up for lost time, a ridiculous expression if ever there was one, an absurd idiom with which we hope to disguise the harsh fact that no time once lost can ever be made up or recovered, as if we believed, contrary to this evident truth, that the time we thought forever lost might, after all, have decided to hang back and wait, with the patience of one who has all the time in the world, for us to notice its absence.
The Cave has been sitting on my shelf for a little while now begging to be read; finally this afternoon I heeded its call and brought it along, on the train ride to the city. (I met Sylvia and Ellen to listen to Deedee reading some wonderful, funny memoirs.)
Saramago's prose pulls me along like nothing else -- the onrush of words won't let me go. It reminds me a little of Gaddis' style, except I think Saramago does it much more successfully than Gaddis. The length of sentences forces you as a reader to keep more context in mind at any moment; but it is not a brute-force thing. The timing is just exquisite, the way each sentence moves through phases: building, droning, falling, building, and the sudden surprising punch of the period. (This is of course partly a testament to the abilities of the translator, Margaret Jull Costa.)
Also: I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'm really taken with Saramago's ability to transform clichéed adages into profound, surprising truths, simply by exploring their implications.
Tonight Ellen and I watched Tin Men. This movie came out when I was 17 -- my memory of it is of it being the first movie where I really noticed the camerawork and composition of the frame. And yes, the visual effect of the movie is pretty stunning; and the characters are even more despicable than I remembered. I wasn't so persuaded, this time around, by Dreyfuss' character's growth, which I expect appealed to me as an adolescent. Levinson should totally film Something Happened, and maybe with Dreyfuss as Slocum. Or maybe the moment has passed.
What really tied the movie together for me was the soundtrack. My only memory of Fine Young Cannibals is of the "She Drives Me Crazy" video. But here they were -- exactly appropriate for this movie. The nightclub scene where they are singing "One Good Thing", one of the highlights of the movie.
I meant to say: The Fine Young Cannibals make me think about NickS's recent post about Squeeze, though I'm not sure how much objective similarity there is between the two bands. FYC rocks way harder IMO.
My Name is Red is set in 1591 -- I am reading Pamuk's essay on "Bellini and the East," from Other Colors, and find out about Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, dated 1480. I don't remember any specific reference to this painting in My Name is Red, but I am sure now that there must have been some -- I must have passed over it as something unfamiliar, not bothered to look it up.
Pamuk says,
The portrait has spawned so many copies, variations, and adaptations, and the reproductions made from these assorted images have gone on to adorn so many textbooks, book covers, newspapers, posters, banknotes, stamps, educational posters, and comic books, that there cannot be a literate Turk who has not seen it hundreds if not thousands of times.
It seems logical that this painting would have been an important element of the debate about artistic style and representation in the Ottoman empire, a century after it was painted. I should keep an eye out for this next time I read the book.
(I see that with this entry, Pamuk becomes the first author about whom I've written 100 posts. Not exactly sure what to make of that, beyond that I'm totally gaga about his writing.)
Tonight we read Chapter 11, which contains one of my clearest memories from reading the book as a child: Huck has disguised himself in a girl's clothing and is scouting out the news in town. He is found out by the woman whom he asks for gossip (Judith Loftus, a newcomer to town; somehow I had in my memory that the woman was Tom's Aunt Polly), when she notices that he throws and catches like a boy. Sylvia thought it was absolutely hilarious that Huck would try to thread a needle by pushing the needle onto the thread; she was still laughing about that ten minutes later.
My Name is Red is set in 1591 -- I am reading Pamuk's essay on "Bellini and the East," from Other Colors, and find out about 
