Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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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.
Jim Henley posts an excellent poem of his that he wrote back in 1997, which he purports to have bearing on the current presidential campaign -- kind of a flimsy excuse I think but I'm glad to be reminded of this poem, with its invocation of Wallace Stevens: Some Affluence of the Planet.
Wallace Stevensâ??s job in Surety Claims
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
of tendrils that we ink into our moneyâ??
stock certificates, bearer bonds, plain cashâ??
are not there only to foil counterfeiters.
Vulgar as the approximations are,
they stand for the fruits of life.
On the subject of writers named Wallace: I'm wondering if Stevens' The Plain Sense of Things can be read as having any bearing on D.F. Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram".
posted morning of September 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
The image on the cover of Death with Interruptions refers to this passage late in the book. The cellist is in the park with his dog, reading a handbook on entomology:
As you can see from the image in the book, the death's head moth, a nocturnal moth, whose latin name is acherontia atropos, bears on the back of its thorax a pattern resembling a human skull, it reaches a wingspan of twelve centimeters and is dark in color, its lower wings being yellow and black. And we call it atropos, that is, death. The musician doesn't know it, nor could he even have imagined such a possibility, but death is gazing, fascinated, over his shoulder, at the color photograph of the moth.
I'm finding it kind of interesting that the man who eludes death (after she has gone back to work) in Death with Interruptions, is a cellist. Not sure exactly how yet. Here are two pieces of music mentioned in the novel:
J.S. Bach's Suite #6, opus 1012, is the music that death sees on the cellist's stand when she visits him; he later has the music with him at orchestra rehearsal, although he is "merely a cellist in the orchestra... not one of those famous concert artistes who travel the world... he's lucky that he occasionally gets a few bars to play solo." Here it is performed by Mstistlav Rostropovitch:
Chopin's Etude #9 in G♭, from opus 25: a short, jumpy piano tune which the cellist tells his colleagues is the only piece of music in which he can really see himself. Here it is performed by Son Yeol-Eum:
posted evening of September 18th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Music
Tomas Eriksson has created an awesome animation -- it allows you to coax a tarantula across a map of Europe. Never thought about how much fun that might be? Well then you're in for a surprise. Link via Old Water Too.
It is time for history: curtana posts today about the arrest of John Rykener in London, in 1395, for engaging in unmentionable crimes, with links to a transcript of Rykener's questioning -- "basically the only legal document describing same-sex intercourse from England at this period."
posted afternoon of September 17th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about History Time
José Saramago has a blog! It is here: Saramago's Notebook -- in Portuguese naturally. There is an "idioma" button at the top of the page that appears to translate the page between Portuguese and Spanish, I have no idea how accurately though. The top entry AOTW is "George Bush, or the Age of Lies" -- opening sentences are approximately, "I wonder how and why the United States, a land of greatness, has often had small presidents. George Bush is perhaps the smallest of them all." (Link via The Literary Saloon.)
Joyce's debut novel is now on the racks! Library Journal says she has written "a rich first novel about love, loss, and the fragile beauty of nature." A schedule of her appearances, plus links to reviews, plus her blog, are all at the novel's website.
In Hovering Flight, by Joyce Hinnefeld, is the top entry on the American Booksellers Association's September list of Indies Picks.
As so often happens, I find myself confused about church teaching. (It is not my church, but I always seem to understand Christianity less well than I think I do or think I should.) Near the beginning of Death with Interruptions, the prime minister gives a pompous and meaningless speech which ends with an invocation of God: "We will accept the body's immortality, he exclaimed in exalted tones, if that is the will of god, to whom we will always offer our grateful prayers for having chosen the good people of this country as his instrument."
A little bit later, the Cardinal phones him, quite angry at his implication that God would will the destruction of the body: "You admitted the possibility that the immortality of the body might be the will of god, and one doesn't need a doctorate in transcendental logic to realize that it comes down to the same thing."
I've got to be missing something here; everything I've taken away from reading about Christianity suggests that it's a fundamental tenet, that God wills the destruction of flesh in general and that God willed his own demise in the particular case of the crucifixion. So I'm kind of struggling here to figure out what Saramago has in mind.
Update: Thanks to correspondence with badger and his friend Bill, I am starting to see the error of my ways. Bill identifies my statement that "God wills the destruction of flesh in general and that God willed his own demise in the particular case of the crucifixion" as Gnostic doctrine, not Christian. I think I'm fundamentally confused about the nature of death in Christian thinking -- I was building off the statement that "to dust you shall return" to get that God was willing the destruction of flesh; but apparently the doctrine of eventual Reincarnation means that the flesh is not destroyed. (I thought when the Cardinal said "without death there can be no resurrection" that he was referring to Christ's resurrection but now it seems like he was talking about the end-times resurrection of the faithful, something that was totally slipping my mind before.) Bill also notes that "Knowing Saramago, though, he's not above having ecclesiastical figures
spout nonsense."
posted evening of September 15th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about José Saramago
Guess what the mailman just dropped through the hole in my front door? It is José Saramago's newly* translated Death with Interruptions. Happy!
I have been reading a couple of posts over the last few days where people name D.F. Wallace as their favorite (sadly no longer) living author, which sort of thing always makes me wonder whether I have an identifiable favorite; and I think right at the moment, the answer is clearly yes, and that my favorite living author is Saramago. My tastes change of course; I had never even read any Saramago before last winter, so he is a recently acquired favorite. Perhaps this time next year I will have found a new fad. But for the moment I feel pretty strongly about specifying him as the living writer who speaks most directly to me.
Before I even open the covers: this is a beautiful volume. Love the black field, the ghostly moth.
The epigraph is from Wittgenstein; I don't know where it is taken from and Google is not helping me, presumably because of translation issues:
If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.
This is making me flash on the discussion of Wallace over the past few days, but possibly just because I've got Wallace on the brain...
There is another epigraph, from the Book of Predictions: "We will know less and less what it means to be human." I'm not sure if this is a reference to The Book of Predictions published in 1980 (which I've never heard of before just now), or something else, perhaps something internal to the story. In any case it sounds like a valid prediction.
Well it's getting to be a long post about a book which I have not even started reading. I will close with the opening sentence of the story:
The following day, no one died.
*I actually think it was translated about 6 months ago and published in the UK, under the title Death at Intervals; but it is just this week available in the US. I'm assuming the two editions must be pretty similar outside the titles.
posted evening of September 15th, 2008: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
In the video that A White Bear linked yesterday, Mark Leyner is asked his thoughts about the audience he's writing for; he responds to the effect that he does not think about audience at all -- writing for him is an obsessive activity like chess for Bobby Fischer, with no object other than the text. David Foster Wallace takes exception to this:
Sometimes it's an act of communication. What makes the analogy ok but also makes it break down, is that
part of the Fischer-like obsession Mark's talking about consists in a kind of mental and emotional dance
with a constructed reader that you figure has a life more or less like yours, and whom in a weird way
you're talking to. Again, I'm like totally with you about 50% of it; the thing about it is that the
light and fun and all that stuff is definitely, that's part of what makes art magical for me; but there's
another part. There's the part -- and I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a puritan or a critic -- but there's
this part that makes you feel full. This part that is redemptive and instructive, where when you read something,
it's not just about -- you go "My God, that's me!" you know, "I've lived like that, I've felt like that, I'm
not alone in the world..."
I felt excited listening to Wallace saying this because it matches up with some things I have been thinking about since last year, specifically to describe my experience of reading Pamuk and more broadly as a way of talking about art in general -- I wrote a brief note about this last November.
A White Bear says,
Wallace is grasping to understand the possibilities of art as transformational, connective tissue between all these lonely people. For most 20th-c writers, that possibility is a sentimentality that died out around the time that Romanticism did.
I want to find out more about this idea in a Romantic context. Were Romantic authors making this argument explicitly or is it something critics read into their work -- or is it an argument made by Romantic critics? And which ones? It's an argument I've been grasping around at for a while and it would be really useful to hear it from someone else's mouth.
Update: and I guess obviously, duh, this is a strong sign that I should read Wallace's essays and criticism. Will get right on that.
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
Tomas Eriksson has created 
It is time for history: 
My tastes change of course; I had never even read any Saramago before last winter, so he is a recently acquired favorite. Perhaps this time next year I will have found a new fad. But for the moment I feel pretty strongly about specifying him as the living writer who speaks most directly to me.