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.
While I'm thinking of it, a lovely passage from Unamuno's Por las tierras de Portugal y de España (quoted by Antonio Garrosa Resina in his essay on The Rivers of the Douro Valley in Literature):
Un río es algo que tiene una fuerte y marcada personalidad, es algo con fisionomía y vida propias. Una de mis más vivos deseos es el de seguir el curso de nuestros grandes ríos, el Duero, el Miño, el Tajo, el Guadiana, el Guadalquivir, el Ebro. Se les
siente vivir. Cogerlos desde su más tierna infancia, desde su cuna, desde la fuente de su más largo brazo, y seguirles por caídas y rompientes, por angosturas y hoces, por vegas y riberas. La vena de agua es para ellos algo asà como la conciencia para nosotros, unas veces agitada y espumosa, otras alojada de cieno, turbia y opaca, otras cristalina y clara, rumorosa a trechos. El agua es, en efecto, la consciencia del paisaje.
A river is something which has a strong, marked personality, is something with a life and physiognomy of its own. One of my strongest desires is that of following the course of our great rivers, the Duero, the Miño, the Tagus, the Guadiana, the Guadalquivir, the Ebro. To experience them. To take them from their deepest infancy, from their cradle, from the well-spring of their long arms, and to follow them through their falls and rapids, through their narrows and pools, through fields and river-banks. The vein of water is for them something like the conscience for us, sometimes foaming and agitated, other times full of mud, turbid and opaque, other times crystalline and clear, whispering along. Water is in effect the self-awareness of the landscape.
(This piece, and Resina's essay in general, reminds me a bit of Saramago's blog entry on Castril de la Peña.)
Found it! -- Many thanks to Deborah for sending me Unamuno's poem "Portugal" (an unpublished fragment), from which the line quoted in The Stone Raft is taken.
Portugal, Portugal, tierra descalza,
acurrucada junta al mar, tu madre,
llorando soledades
de trágicos amores,
mientras tus pies desnudos las espumas
saladas bañan,
tu verde cabellera suelta al viento
-- cabellera de pinos rumorosos --
los codos descansando en las rodillas,
y la cara morena entre ambas palmas,
clavas tus ojos donde el sol se acuesta
solo en la mar inmensa,
y en el lento naufragio asà meditas
de tus glorias de Oriente,
cantando fados quejumbrosa y lenta.
Portugal, Portugal, o barefoot land,
nestled by the sea, your mother,
weeping lonely
over tragic loves
while the salty foam
bathes your naked feet,
your green locks loose to the wind --
locks of whispering pines --
your elbows resting on your knees
and your dark face between your palms,
cast your eyes where the sun goes down
alone in the immense sea
and in this slow shipwreck reflect
on your Oriental glories,
singing fados, plaintive and slow.
(Not making any claims about the quality of this translation -- it is done on the fly. If you have any ideas about how it could be improved, feel free to mention them in the comments.) It's a pretty poem -- in his (engaging) essay on The Rivers of the Douro Valley in Literature, Antonio Garrosa Resina notes that Unamuno composed it during a visit to Oporto in 1907. I'm a little uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of "junta al mar, tu madre" in line 2 and "soledades" in line 3 -- I must be mistranslating this -- not sure what the (plural) "soledades" is referring to but it can't be (singular) Portugal, who is next to her mother the sea... maybe it's "weeping over tragic solitary loves." (Also: is the "slow shipwreck" the sunset? I think Portugal's glories being "Oriental" is a reference to the subject of The Stone Raft, the treaty which gives Portugal imperial dominion over all lands to the east of a particular longitude, Spain over lands to its west.)
There they are now, as Unamuno described them, his swarthy face cupped in the palms of his hands, Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea, all nations with the sea to the west do the same, this race is swarthy, there is no other particularity, and it has sailed the seas.
I'm not going to argue with italicizing the quoted portion and capitalizing its first letter, I mean it's not in the original but it reads fine; but how could "la cara morena" possibly be understood as referring to Unamuno's face rather than as part of the quotation? This makes no sense at all to me -- it's an interesting image but it can't be the image intended in the original passage. Note how "moreno" is used again referring to the Portuguese race -- this is the only distinction between them and other peoples with the sea to the west. Here's my attempt at an improvement, relying heavily on Pontiero for a sense of the flow of the passage:
There they are now, as Unamuno described them, Your dark face between your palms, cast your eyes where the sun goes down alone in the immense sea, all peoples with the sea to the west do the same, this one is dark-skinned, there's no other distinction, and has sailed the seas.
posted evening of October 19th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Here's a new line of attack for a problem that's been bugging me a little while; when I was reading The Stone Raft I was enchanted by the line, which Saramago attributes to Unamuno, "Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea." Haven't had any luck figuring out where that line came from, if he's quoting an actual Unamuno poem -- I don't know what the Spanish being quoted (in Portuguese, and then translated) is, and the English does not seem to match up with any existing translations...
Tonight I had the thought, why not try writing something with that line as a starting point, and taking as read that it was from a poem of Unamuno's... A first try (and assuming this line of inquiry bears any fruit, some more updates as time passes) below the fold.
1. Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea, he said in Spain, might just as well have said in California. Dark-eyed surfer dude shading his swarthy brow -- peer into the pomegranate clouds of sunset. This rainy eastern beach chills me to the bone.
2. I wish I could look
to where the lonely sun
sets in the immense sea --
my thoughts will not stay here, tonight,
nor yet with you, at home;
my restless heart craves stasis, craves
a still, still settling, slow.
My hand commits to paper
what my brain already knows, and hopes,
in dreams I see your dark eyes
in the cloudy twilight shore.
Ellen and I spent most of the weekend setting up our dining room to paint it: covering the floor with newspaper and drop-cloths, taping edges and corners, and applying primer. It's not a huge room but it's a fairly intimidating job because of how the room is put together: lots of molding everywhere that requires attentive care and the use of a brush instead of a roller, including an insane crown molding that has 12 surfaces -- besides the crown molding there is a chair rail and a baseboard, and three doorways and a window. There will be a whole lot of taping, too, which we have not even started yet; for now we are priming everything together. We made pretty good progress! Finished off a can of primer, we've done everything except one section of crown molding and most of the ceiling. we'll finish that up tomorrow night and then the fun of applying the actual colors begins.
Ellen is primarily in charge of the color selection, with input from her friend Lisa and (a bit) from me -- she has settled on some colors from the Benjamin Moore catalog that look pretty nice to me, I will try and find them online and link to a sample.
I am really enjoying Channel 13's presentation Reel 13 on Saturday nights, although it is consistently making me stay up past my bedtime... Last night they showed The Pink Panther -- which I have watched a couple of times before but always glad to see again -- Adaptation -- which I watched when it came out, but had forgotten completely; what a fun, gripping, moving film! -- and this beautiful animated short, Le Loup Blanc by Pierre-Luc Granjon:
I tend to just think of The Pink Panther as a Peter Sellers vehicle -- I had forgotten how much worth watching the rest of the cast are, in particular David Niven and Claudia Cardinale. And the music! Obviously the theme is a great song, but there are a lot of other gems in the soundtrack as well. I sort of want to know what the movie is parodying -- I had been thinking of it as a parody of James Bond films, but Ellen pointed out that it came out in 1963, only a year after the first Bond film... It could be a parody of the thriller genre maybe?
posted afternoon of October 18th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Animation
Last night I dreamed about cooking -- I was making a stewed chicken and rice dish and bizarrely using my espresso pot to cook it in. It came out beautifully -- the grains of rice were soft and puffed up so they looked like orzo -- and they overflowed the pot like popcorn, spilling out onto the stovetop, which was already covered in some kind of red sauce that I had been cooking before that. It looked really tasty and lots of people were there hungry and wanting to be served...
As long as I am thinking about recipes, here are a couple of links: The NY Times Magazine reprints a recipe for Worcestershire sauce originally published in 1876 (although it contains the direction "refrigerate", which surprises me -- were refrigerators standard kitchen appliances in 19th Century NYC?*), and an updated version from Boston chef Barbara Lynch. The updated version is made with Vietnamese fish paste so does not require any fermentation time, it's ready to serve right away; the old recipe takes a month to mature. Worcestershire sauce traces its ancestry to the Malay condiment kecap, as does Ketchup; at The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky looks at the history of this condiment. And here is an old piece by Malcolm Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum.
* Wikipædia reports that "At the start of the 20th century, about half of households in the United States relied on melting ice (in an icebox) to keep food cold, while the remaining half had no cooled storage at all, possibly excepting a 'root cellar'." So I'm thinking "refrigerate" is a modern edit of an 1876 recipe.
posted morning of October 17th, 2009: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Recipes
Arthur Ganson specializes in kinetic sculptures. Thanks to Martha for pointing this out -- this is great, addictive stuff! I am sorry I'm not in Cambridge to see his show at M.I.T.
Thanks to Alvy Singer for pointing out a new list of top-fifty animated films from Time Out, with some commentary by Terry Gilliam! I'm glad to see they gave Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs a place on the list, even though it's so new and unproven. I am as convinced as they are that "this maddeningly ingenious and wildly original smart kidsâ?? adventure will one day take its rightful place in the animated pantheon. " Most of the Miyazaki masterpieces make the list, with My Neighbor Totoro taking top ranking as is well and good. The list is a little biased toward feature films -- it seems like the shorts by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery deserve pride of place. Jones has "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie" from 1979 at number 3, but that was decades after his finest work.
I wanted to write a post tonight about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which Sylvia and I watched last night and just loved; and I wanted to make the point right up front what a visual treat the movie is. Of course I went looking around the web for stills; and I found a lot of them, but none that quite communicates what a rollicking lot of fun it is to watch this movie... The one above is about the closest I could get. So you'll have to take it on faith I guess -- walking out of the movie you feel like you've been at a feast.
The movie is extremely clever -- there are a lot of the Pixar-style asides making jokes to the adults in the audience, they are very well-done: they made me laugh without hitting me over the head what was going on. And more, the jokes seemed true to the characters and situations. What was lacking in Up, I thought, was nuance; this movie has nuance and subtlety. It is able to make a standard-issue children's lit point -- about (in a nutshell) smart kids being ostracized and having trouble getting anywhere in life, but sticking to their dreams and eventually finding self-realization -- without slipping into after-school special sentimentality. It is, in addition to being tons of fun, moving and uplifting.
posted evening of October 12th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Besides the Magdalene to the right (who seems like a appropriate emblem for this site), I was really taken with this picture of Philippe de Croÿ, the right half of a diptych:
