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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.
I wanted to recommend this film, I don't have much to say about it besides that it is light-hearted and sentimental, and a lot of fun. It's Historias mÃnimas, an Argentine film (d. Carlos Sorin) with a couple of independent stories cleverly interwoven, three people making their way from Fitz Roy to San Julián. Trailer here. Breathtaking Patagonian landscapes and visuals in general.
posted evening of June 24th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
"I believe the best thing is for an author to intervene as little as possible in his work."
Well this is an exciting find: a lecture by Borges with the stated subject, "Concerning My Stories." I've been reading his stories, and some of his essays and lectures as well, but him talking about writing his stories is a new one for me! New and welcome.
Unfortunately none of the sites where I'm finding this lecture have any information about its provenance.* It's definitely from the late '70's or early '80's (because of which stories he talks about), and I'm guessing it was given in Argentina. Don't know what book it was published in, or if it has appeared in translation -- it is not in Selected Non-Fictions.
He discusses four stories: "The Zahir," "The Book of Sand," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" -- he describes these three as variations on a single theme, which seems to me to be stretching it, though I can certainly see the similarities between the first two -- and "The Weary Man's Utopia," which I was surprised at because it had made so little impression on me when I read it** -- I had to scratch my head for a while to even remember what he was talking about. He calls The Book of Sand "my greatest book, if I may speak of greatest books." (I will need to go back to The Book of Sand -- it does not seem to me like his greatest book, but I have only read it once, and at the tail end of reading all his other works.)
I found the talk about composing "The Zahir" the most interesting -- he starts out with just a word, "unforgettable," and imagines what it might mean if it were used in a literal sense. Progresses from there to talking about choosing a coin as the unforgettable object, about obsession, about Poe and Lenore, about love and God and insanity.
** And when he is talking about "The Weary Man's Utopia" he makes reference to a Coleridge line which sounded very familiar as I was reading it -- turns out, it is the line which Pamuk used as his epigraph to The Museum of Innocence.
On my birthday last month, the Saramago Foundation started updating the man's blog a few times a week with quotations from his work, from his books and his articles and his speeches. I'm not sure how I feel about this -- the entries are worth reading and it's nice to be introduced to some of his work that I didn't know about (and it did seem like a nice birthday present), while OTOH I had been identifying the blog (naturally) closely with him, and it's unsettling for him to be in the ground and the blog to continue. They have retitled it Saramago's Other Notebooks, which could help in identifying it as a new blog.
Today's entry comes from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:
La palabra es lo mejor que se puede encontrar, la tentativa siempre frustrada para expresar eso a lo que, por medio de palabra, llamamos pensamiento.
The Word
The word is the greatest thing you will ever meet, the always frustrated effort to express that which, by means of the word, we call thought. [Vastly improved translation contributed by Rick in comments]
(Speaking of notebooks, I have ordered a copy of the Lanzarote Notebooks and am looking forward to reading it! though it will be my first posthumous Saramago...)
Update: Wow -- this is a really, really good album. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a first-record-in-20-years... whatever I was expecting, this exceeds it many times over. The cats are a nice touch too.
posted afternoon of June 21st, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what no ears have heard? Listen to the sparrow's cry. Do you want to touch that which no hands have touched? Touch the soil. Truly I tell you, God has not yet created the earth.
from the teachings of the Histrionic heretics
Thinking about "The Theologians" is a very fruitful activity -- it is a well that I can go back to repeatedly and never find it dry. I'm wondering what is the "discourse of 20 words" which Aurelianus uses obliquely to condemn Pannonia to the stake. Note here the deep irony of Pannonia's being condemned using words he wrote to denounce Euphorbius. But what is confusing me here is the repetition of "20 words" -- earlier Borges had noted that these 20 were the only words surviving from the work of John of Pannonia; he is attaching a lot of significance to the words -- but he never quotes them! It's a big missing piece in the center of the puzzle...
The irony that I'm seeing here in Pannonia's situation is a reflection of the irony in the Church's treatment of dissent.* The first group of heretics, the Monotoni, propose that time is cyclical, that every present moment will be repeated without end; for that Euphorbius is burned. Now the Histrioni teach that time can never repeat itself, that each instant is of necessity unique -- based on this and other crimes, an inquisitorial court is formed to prosecute them. The church's problem is with any intellectual innovation (as Aurelianus himself notes with respect to the first persecution) rather than with the specific content of the teachings.
This makes it difficult to sympathize with either of the main characters -- they are after all participating (cynically in Aurelianus' case and in John's case as a true believer, if I am reading correctly) in these inquisitions on the side of power -- I'm left to identify with the narrator as a voice of sarcasm and occasionally with a minor character like Euphorbius. Borges describes the main characters in his afterword as "a dream, a somewhat melancholy dream, of personal identity" -- which makes me wonder who he is trying to identify with.
*Side thought here -- I have never thought of Borges as a particularly political or satirical author. Is he poking fun at the power relationships in the mediæval Church here, or primarily interested in painting Aurelianus as a tragic figure? It would be worth spending some time working out what I mean by a "political and satirical author"...
There is a further irony, I think, in the juxtaposition of John of Pannonia's persecution with the vandalism of the library in the first paragraph of the story -- Volume XII of Civitas Dei was misinterpreted because the rest of the work had been destroyed; and Pannonia's 20 words were used against him because the context of his treatise had been (wilfully) forgotten.
There is something special about Borges' stories which are set in Argentina and Uruguay, particularly I'm thinking of the stories like "The South", "The Dead Man", "Funes", and of the stories in Brodie's Report -- I get a similar feeling from reading these stories as from watching Westerns -- the same sort of longing for cultural identity, construction and description of a cultural identity. In "The Dead Man" we see Borges addressing the reader directly, it takes me by surprise every time I read it. BenjamÃn Otálora has fled a murder charge in Buenos Aires and is working as a gaucho in Tacuarembó:
Here began, for Otálora, a different life; a life of vast dawns, days smelling of horses. This life is new to him, sometimes harsh, but it is already in his blood; just as men of other nations worship and fear the sea, we (and also the man who is interweaving these symbols) long for the infinite pampas echoing with hoofbeats.
We! Also the man who is interweaving these symbols! I don't think Borges refers so clearly and unambiguously to himself in any of his other fictions (leaving aside those pieces like "Borges and I" and "The Other" which are specifically introspective) -- that parenthesis seems to me designed to clear away all the levels of confusion about who is saying "we".
posted morning of June 20th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
I do believe I've got it! favicon.ico is the image that gets displayed in the title bar of the browser (for browsers which support this capability, which is most of them) when a reader is looking at your web page. (Also it is used by things like rss readers as a visual way of identifying your site.) For a long time I have wanted to have a butterfly icon to go with the butterflies that are my background image and the butterfly at the top of the page*. Sort of an homage to Nabokov and to GarcÃa Márquez; plus I just like the little things. For a long time I was using a shrunken-down version of the big butterfly; but at 16×16 pixels it did not (as Sylvia did not tire of pointing out) look particularly like a butterfly (); then I tried shrinking the butterfly image which is in the sidebar of Zembla; but again, it is too detailed to make a good icon (). I looked at some favicon library sites the other day and found a couple of nice butterflies but nothing that was exactly right for readin. But finally I found this butterfly, at the site of the (lamentably out of business) Brooklyn housewares store Nova Zembla:
Excellent! I shrank it down, added a little color, it seems just right to me:**
* If you are not seeing a butterfly at the top of the page, it is because I made that only show up on Firefox, Chrome and Safari -- I couldn't get msie to display it the way I wanted it to, those were the only browsers I tested on.
** (If you are not seeing the new butterfly icon, that may be because your browser has cached one of the old ones. Browsers seem to store favicon's in their cache longer than a lot of other files...)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about The site
To be immortal is banal -- except for man, every creature is immortal, not knowing of death. The divine, the terrible, the incomprehensible, is to know oneself to be immortal.
Bryan Nelson's post at Mother Nature Network on the 10 animals with the longest life spans has some beautiful photography, including this magnificently anthropomorphic* picture of turritopsis nutricula, believed to be the only animal with no natural limit to its lifespan. (Thanks for the link, John!)
Related in only the very most tenuous and impressionistic manner, Katy Butler's piece in this mornings New York Times Magazine on dealing with her father's dementia and unnaturally prolonged death, and with a medical establishment devoted unreflectively to such prolongation, sent a chill down my spine. To be, like Ms. Butler's mother, "continent and lucid to [one's] end," seems to me a fine thing, a fate I will hope for for myself and those I love, a fate I will try to work for.
*(or "cyclopomorphic" I guess -- a grimacing Cyclops with a frizzy beard.)
Life is like a candle burning; when it comes to the end it blazes brightly before it goes out. I believe that I'm now in the period of blazing before I go out. I can see very clearly that I will not go on living much longer. Now I'm in a phase where if I believe that I can carry out some task and that I can do it well, I want to do it. After it all stops and my books remain, I think they will continue to be read.
Hmm... So in 1903 this Austrian polymath/​Golden-Dawnian writes a proto-science-fiction story imagining a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (translation here)...
"I believe the best thing is for an author to intervene as little as possible in his work."
Listen to DEVO's 
"Amanecer en la pampa", 
); then I tried shrinking the butterfly image which is in the sidebar of 
). I looked at some favicon library sites the other day and found a couple of nice butterflies but nothing that was exactly right for 
