READIN

Friday, November 6th, 2009

🦋 Set List

John was over tonight (after the reading) and we jammed out for a couple of hours. This is the approximate set list with some comments. (Hoping to keep set lists every time we play -- that seems like a good way of keeping track of the music.)

• Prodigal Son -- this was good, maybe my favorite song of the evening. I used to play a pretty good version of this on guitar, I'm finding it's a very different song on violin -- here is a tape of me playing it, except with no guitar or vocals: Prodigal Son (the ending needs work, both in the solo and duet versions)
• California Stars by Woody Guthrie and Wilco -- a really fun song to play. I'm trying to work out the structure of the song a little better. Playing the solos can be very much effortless, like laying one's head on a bed of California stars. But I have to maintain a balance, not sink too much into the bed.
• Lay Me Down a Pallette on Your Floor -- another song that is very different on fiddle. Lovely old tune about adultery.
• Beautiful World by ? -- don't quite get this song.
• Angel From Montgomery by John Prine. I like playing this song a lot, not sure if I enjoy singing it.
• IKY Rider
• Honky Tonk Woman
• Jockey Full of Bourbon by Tom Waits -- totally new song for me. I like it a lot.
• Cry Baby Cry
• Mother Nature's Son
• Will the Circle Be Unbroken
• Jesus Etc.
• The Louisville Burglar

A song it would be fun to play:

• Weary Day by the Stanley Bros.
• Amazing Grace, but faster and without the lack of synchronization caused by recording in multiple tracks -- which should be easily solved by having two people play it instead of one in two takes.
• After Midnight by Patsy Cline

posted evening of November 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

🦋 Kinks

Ellen and I got our tickets today to see Ray Davies! He'll be playing at the end of the month in Montclair. Well I'm excited: The Kinks are a band I've always liked when I listen to their music, although I'm not very familiar with the span of their œuvre, I know a lot of their songs and love when they come on the radio -- as Ellen was saying earlier, the trouble with The Kinks is all their songs are just so catchy, you can't stop singing them when you hear one.

I don't really know anything about Davies as a solo act, I understand he plays a lot of the old Kinks tracks and some new music as well. Everything I've been reading online over the past few years suggests it's going to be a great show.

And what great timing! Holly of The Song In My Head Today has picked November as the month of The Kinks; every day she is posting reflections on a song of theirs, one song per album, in chronological order. So far:

1. Stop Your Sobbing, from The Kinks.
2. Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl, from Kinda Kinks.
3. Where Have All the Good Times Gone, from The Kink Kontroversy.
4. Too Much on My Mind, from Face to Face.

posted evening of November 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, November first, 2009

🦋 Where do you come from?

I kind of enjoy watching the Google referrals that float by on the right-hand side of the blog under "Where You Came From" -- idly tracking the number of searches that are likely for something that would appear on the page they accessed (ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram) versus words that seem no more related to what I've published here than they would to a page chosen at random from the web (+"dolly parton" ​+sneezed). Here are some popular queries over the last few months:

• 13 views: q=what+do+hobbits+look+like
• 14 q=stroszek+soundtrack
• 16 q=movies+about+outcasts
• 17 q=museum+of+innocence
• 20 q=el+libro+talonario+translation
• 20 q=of+love+and+other+demons+analysis
• 22 q=codex+seraphinianus+download
• 31 q=the+hamlet+faulkner
• 33 q=readin
• 39 q=gordita+beach

posted evening of November first, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Collective happiness

(Today Isabella of Magnificent Octopus has a review up of Museum of Innocence -- a positive and thoughtful one, and she mentions this blog in a complimentary light, which makes me feel flattered and happy -- take a look!)

I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness we all can share?

This line (from chapter 60) works on a couple of levels. Yes it is a purpose of novels and museums (not "the purpose", but of course Kemal is single-minded) to establish a collective consciousness, and a collective happiness is one facet of that. But this novel is not about Kemal's happiness, it's about his un-happiness, his fixation on becoming happy and becoming authentic, which fixation is leading him farther and farther away from happiness and authenticity. So when he says he wants us to appreciate the pleasure he felt from the outings with the Keskins, behind that is what role these outings play in his unraveling.

posted afternoon of November first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009

🦋 Jamming

This has been a really excellent weekend for playing music -- last night I jammed with John, who I met pretty recently and had not played with previously, and was startled to find that we're on just about the same page musically. We picked up each other's songs very quickly and got some nice harmonies going.

Then today I played with Bob and Janis and Gregory, and realized that we've really made a lot of progress over the past half a year or so, after a couple of years of being in a rut -- at this point one of us can call a tune and even if we haven't played it in a while, we jump right in and harmonize. A musical milestone of sorts for me this afternoon was playing violin and singing in unison with it -- I've never been able to figure that out before but today it was sounding all right. (Neither the playing nor the singing was as good, quite, as if I do one or the other -- but I could hear how they were going to get better.)

posted evening of October 31st, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Happy Hallowe'en!

Only comes around once a year... Here's Sylvia dressed for the occasion, with her friends Kaydi, Jazmyn and Emma:

posted morning of October 31st, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Playing cards

Sylvia and I are going to the toy store today to get a cribbage board. Here are my three favorite card games from childhood: cassino, cribbage, gin rummy. Sylvia is pretty good at cassino -- we played this morning and she beat me -- just learning cribbage -- we've been playing two and three hands, no board, just counting points, for a few weeks now -- and as yet not introduced to gin rummy.

I have forgotten a lot of the details of cribbage rules! The first time I played with Sylvia I did not even remember to stop play at 31. Certain details of the scoring still elude me, like "Nobs" and "Nibs" -- I am relearning this stuff as I teach it to Sylvia.

In general I played a lot of cards as a child, with my parents and uncle and grandfather, and solitaire. The deck of playing cards has an iconic position in my mind -- the cut, the shuffle, the fan, the visual aspect of each card and the tactile aspect of the cards, each of these feels important, like a piece of my home. I'm kind of attracted to Tarot for its connections with playing cards although the mysticism has kind of lost the charm it held for my 20 -year-old self.

posted morning of October 31st, 2009: 1 response

Friday, October 30th, 2009

🦋 Never forget the objects as you write

In this week's NY Times Magazine, Negar Azimi takes a look at the Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is constructing in Istanbul. Pamuk says, "My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps."

posted morning of October 30th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

🦋 Before Esperanto...

I happened today on Borges' essay on "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (thanks for the link, Dave!) -- Douglas Crockford has put a parallel translation of it online on his web site, it's not clear whose translation he's using. Great fun to read, and it includes a list of the types of animals which I'm pretty sure is included as a fragment in Book of Imaginary Beings:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge*. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into:

1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. trained
4. piglets
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in this classification
9. trembling like crazy
10. innumerables
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. just broke the vase
14. from a distance look like flies

Wilkins made an early attempt to create a universal language -- some of his work An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language is online in facsimile here; Borges also references some other early attempts, Johann Martin Schleyer's Volapük, Giuseppe Peano's Interlingua, and Bonifacio Sotos Ochando's Lengua universal. (Pedro Mata's Curso de lengua universal, referenced by Borges, is online in its entirety at Google Books.)

*Wikipædia notes that the truth of this attribution is open to question. Laszlo Cseresnyesi of Shikoku Gakuin University wrote a post on LINGUIST-l in 1996 discussing the Celestial Emporium. "The responses I have received leave no doubt that I'd better give up on the search for the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Creatures (and stop pestering my colleagues at the Chinese Department). However, I believe that one cannot prove the non-existence of a book conclusively, and I have had no chance to follow all the conceivable leads in a major library."

posted evening of October 27th, 2009: 1 response
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Monday, October 26th, 2009

🦋 Pamuk, Varda

I was exuberant at the thought of beginning anew, and greatly soothed by the consolations of life in a yalı, so much so that during the first few days I convinced myself that a rapid recovery was in prospect. No matter what amusements we'd partaken in on the previous evening, no matter how late we'd come back, and no matter how much I'd had to drink, in the morning, as soon as the light began to stream through the gaps in the shutters, casting its strange reflections of Bosphorus waves onto the ceiling, I would throw open the shutters, each time amazed at the beauty that rushed in, that almost exploded, through the window.

posted evening of October 26th, 2009: Respond
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