The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.
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.
Time to gather your arse up off the floor,
(have a bana-na)
Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war.
Wave your hand to sleepy land,
Kiss those dreams away,
Tell Miss Grable you're not able,
Not till V-E Day, oh,
Ev'rything'll be grand in Civvie Street
(have a bana-na)
Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet --
But there's still the German or two to fight,
So show us a smile that's shiny bright,
And then, as we may have suggested once before --
Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!
The good people at the London Banana Project have been uploading photos of urban banana peels to their site. And I say it's a fine thing; I like to think Pirate would agree with me. (Thanks for the link, Christine!)
Update: Dave Barber is clear-eyed in the face of lurking danger. "At minimum, the locations of the banana peels should be plotted on a coordinate map to see if they fit a Poisson distribution."
And since I was its audience, I was happy with it. Not sure I learned much about Thompson that I did not already know; but I liked watching the footage. His ex-wife, who got a lot of screen-time, was definitely the most interesting person they interviewed. I could have done without all the re-enactments of him typing stories, and I could totally have done without so much screen time devoted to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, easily the least interesting portion of the movie. I just absolutely did not get why they would use footage from the 1998 movie.
posted evening of August third, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Gonzo
How little they must have known him, to address him and speak of him in this way. They take advantage of his death, his feet and hands are bound. They call him a despoiled lily, a lily like a girl stricken by typhoid fever, and use the adjective gentle. Such banality, dear God. Since gentle means noble, chivalrous, gallant, elegant, pleasing, and ubane, which of these would the poet have chosen as he lay in his Christian bed in the Hospital of São Luís. May the gods grant that it be pleasing, for with death one should lose only life.
Starting The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis so soon after I finished The Cave I am really noticing something about Saramago's pacing; the last half of the book really pulls you along in a rush, where the first half is much slower and more open to stopping, starting, jumping back to a few pages previous. I think I have had similar experiences with Blindness and Seeing, as well.
Meanwhile the guest returns to the reception desk, somewhat out of breath after all that effort. He takes the pen and enters the essential details about himself in the register of arrivals, so that it might be known who he claims to be, in the appropriate box on the lined page. Name, Ricardo Reis, age, forty-eight, place of birth, Oporto, marital status, bachelor, profession, doctor, last place of residence, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whence he has arrived aboard the Highland Brigade. It reads like the beginning of a confession, an intimate autobiography, all that is hidden is contained in these handwritten lines, the only problem is to interpret them.
The three books I have read so far by Saramago are all quite recent; now I am going back much further, to 1986's Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, one of the earliest of his major works. But it is instantly recognizable as the work of the same author based on his distinctive style and on his manner of expression -- I can't picture the construction "so that it might be known who he claims to be" coming out precisely that way from any other author's pen. This book is not translated by Margaret Jull Costa but by Giovanni Pontiero -- the similarity of voice gives me confidence in the abilities of both translators.
I see Saramago's habit of deconstructing commonplace expressions coming through here, although the two examples I've noted in the opening pages -- "pay the fare" and another that I'm not finding now -- are not arresting in the way that I've found his later work. This book is set explicitly in Portugal, in Lisbon, unlike the anonymous countries and cities of his later books. I find that I have no preconceived image of Portugal! So I guess I will acquire one here.
Oh! I see now that Blindness was also translated by Pontiero; I had forgotten.
I read to the end of McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk today -- it is a good book and I think especially useful to the non-Turkish reader (i.e. myself) approaching Pamuk's books for the second time, to clarify cultural and historical references that might otherwise be lost. Does a really good job of drawing out common threads in Pamuk's books which the disparity of voices and styles can obscure. In short -- I would strongly recommend it if you have read all or most of Pamuk's novels to date and are thinking about rereading them. It also makes brief reference to the forthcoming Museum of Innocence, which will be translated by Erdağ Göknar -- in his application for a grant to do the translation, Göknar says,
the protagonist "comes from an upper-class Instanbul family who, after two failed relationships, goes on an obsessive journey in search of places and objects that remind him of his lost loves and that, once assembled, constitute the bulk of a museum of his obsessions"
which is more than I had heard about the content of the book before now.
McGaha ends by saying,
Orhan Pamuk is only fifty-five years old and is at the peak of his creative powers. There is every reason to believe that his best work still lies ahead of him. I look forward to reading his novels for many years to come.
which -- Wow! What a lovely thought! I can't wait for Museum of Innocence. (Which not that it means anything, but I'm finding kind of charming the parallelism between its title and Robyn Hitchcock's song, "Museum of Sex".)
Note: apparently Göknar's application did not pan out; Freely is doing the translation, which will be published in October '09.
The BBC documentaries about Stax records which Chris mentioned yesterday are not available to US web surfers; but you can watch the the Stax '67 tour of Norway on YouTube, albeit broken up into ten-minute chunks and subject to slow downloading. Use the playlist to watch all 6 in order.
posted afternoon of August second, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Blues
Ellen and I are clearing out dead stuff and overly grown stuff from the fern and forsythia garden on the side of the house, about the state of which the bitchy neighbor has been complaining and which, if the truth be told, is getting a little long in the tooth.
Me: Did you see that vine with the pretty blue flowers? I hadn't noticed that before.
Ellen: No...
Me: It was right over here -- (looks around) Huh, now I don't see it. (A little later, looking under a fern and seeing a bit of plant with a flower attached) See, like this! I could have sworn there were a lot of them over here!
Ellen: Oh yeah, those are weeds. I usually pull them, they're pretty invasive.
(And this afternoon, the neighbor thanked us and apologized for complaining about it. Nice! Back on good terms.)
posted morning of August second, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The garden
Caroline Winter's column on the majuscule first-person pronoun (which appears only in English) is about 30% interesting, 70% silly; uncommonly good for the Times "On Language" column. I'm mainly linking because it contains the lovely word "majuscule".
The 
Senator Obama is 47 today! He is speaking in Michigan today about energy policy.
We're going out tonight to see Gonzo -- how exciting!
The BBC documentaries about Stax records which Chris 
WFMU's Hear It Wow 