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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've started reading Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through violence with the idea that I might be able to draw some parallels between his narrative of myth formation and Borges' stories... In service of that end, here is a passage from "Narrative of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (from The Aleph) and one from Slotkin's book.
John Williams' narrative, The Redeemed Captive, taught that the ultimate salvation of the soul itself was really at stake in the trial by captivity. One of Williams' daughters, who was very young when captured, could not be won from her captors in time for repatriation with her father. The result was typical of the fate of many captives: she forgot her language and her catechism and became at once a papist and a pagan savage, married to an Indian. Despite the efforts of her father and her family to bring her back, she refused all opportunities to resume her former life. On one occasion she returned to the neighborhood of her birthplace (Deerfield, MA) dressed as an Indian. Her friends clothed her in the English fashion and sent her to meeting, but she "indignantly threw off her clothes in the afternoon, and resumed the Indian blanket." By her own declaration she preferred the Indian way of life. ...she declared that she would never move again from Canada to New England because to do so would "endanger her soul."
Her visit occurred in 1740-41 at the height of the Great Awakening, and her presence in the congregation had been the occasion for "A Sermon Preached at Mansfield, August 4, 1741, at a Time set apart for Prayer for the Revival of Religion," by Pastor Solomon Williams. It was perhaps Williams' attempt to use her as an example of God's delivering a soul from bondage to the devil that made her afraid of "losing" in New England the "soul" she had developed in thirty-eight years of captivity.
-- Chapter 4, "Israel in Babylon"
Perhaps for one instant the two women saw that they were sisters; they were far from their beloved island in an incredible land. My grandmother, enunciating carefully, asked some question or other; the other woman replied haltingly, searching for the words and then repeating them, as though astonished at the old taste of them. It must have been fifteen years since she'd spoken her native language, and it was not easy to recover it. She said she was from Yorkshire, that her parents had emigrated out to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians, and that now she was the wife of a minor chieftain -- she'd given him two sons; he was very brave. She said all this little by little, in a clumsy sort of English interlarded with words from the Auracan or Pampas tongue, and behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life... An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism! Moved by outrage and pity, my grandmother urged her not to go back. She swore to help her, swore to rescue her children. The other woman answered that she was happy, and she returned that night to the desert.
--"The Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (Hurley's translation)
Harvey Pekar passed away on Monday at the age of 70. I'm sorry he is gone; loved to read his comix. I was never a fan, exactly -- I think I only own one collection of American Splendor, plus The Quitter -- it was always something I read at somebody else's recommendation. Still, worth noting his passing, and pointing out some particularly good memorial writing I've seen around the blogosphere this week:
Roy Edroso remembers Harvey as a professional curmudgeon and a poet.
Jeet Heer remembers Harvey as a working-class Jewish radical, a giant.
Scott Eric Kaufman remembers Harvey as a proto-blogger, as a narrator of his own life; and in another post, expands on the act of narrating one's life.
Another artist who died on Monday (at the age of 86), who did not get as much attention in the subset of blogs that I read but whom I am in mourning for as well, is Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. Albert Amateau has written his obituary at The Villager; more write-ups and more links at The Allen Ginsberg Project. (And a fine remembrance of Tuli from Mary Lyn Maiscott at Vanity Fair.) A memorial service for Tuli will be held at St. Mark's church on Saturday, from 12-3 pm, with a reception to follow. There will be no religious element to the service, and Coby, Steve and Ed of the Fugs will be the main speakers. Afterwards, anyone who wants to can talk, sing, recite poetry, or whatever they like.
National Geographicreports on the discovery that Margay cats in the Brazilian rainforest can mimic their prey when hunting. Interesting finding, and such a stunning photograph. (This photo of a Margay kitten is quite beautiful too, though not in the same breathtaking way.)
Det Perfekte Manneske (1967) by Jørgen Leth. It is the inspiration and raw materials for Lars von Trier's (and Leth's) 2003 film The 5 Obstructions. (I'm a little puzzled about the English; in von Trier's film the clips of Leth's film are in Danish, but that does sound like Leth's voice. Maybe he made two copies of it with the voiceover in Danish and English. I can't find the Danish on the web.)
posted afternoon of July 11th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
This beginning is fairly characteristic of the stories in Brodie's Report -- the narrator (who is often identifiably Borges) distances himself from the story he is telling. He introduces it as a story he heard years ago, that he doesn't remember, quite, and is embroidering with his own inventions -- sometimes (eg "Unworthy") the character who is telling the enclosed story explicitly expects Borges to weave a story out of it, to decorate it with knife fights and lawlessness.
Honestly. Blu's animated grafittis just keep getting better, more powerful, more beautiful. Today via The Wooster Collective I see he has (they have?) a new piece, Big Bang Big Boom — a "short unscientific story about evolution and his consequences":
Update: Also, Blu's first book is in the stores (well, at least one store). You can get Blu 2004-2007 from Studiocromie, 24 €. (And of course the shipping -- outside of Europe you will pay 25 € to have the book sent to you. Inside Europe it is 19 €, still quite steep.) The World's Best Evertakes a look inside; and more photos at ekosystem.org.
posted afternoon of July 5th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Graffiti
In two or three pieces in Alma del suburbio, Carriego approached the epic; others were closer to social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
-- Borges, foreword to Versos de Carriego
Here are Carlos Gavito and Marsela Duran, tangoing to Eduardo Rovira's "A Evaristo Carriego." The orchestra is the Boston Pops.
* (or "omnipresent sacred rabble" maybe? di Giovanni renders it "cosmic holy rabble".)
At the opening of "Juan Muraña" (the fifth story in Brodie's Report), Borges refers back to a biography of Evaristo Carriego which he wrote in 1930 (and which I see was translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in 1984*) -- his old classmate Trápani mentions the book by way of asking what Borges knows of "malevos," a word which I am not finding in the dictionary but which Hurley translates as "fighters and thugs and underworld types." ("Gangsters" seems like it might work just as well...)
I took the opportunity to have a look at Borges' foreword to Versos de Carriego, a selection which he edited in 1964** -- it is giving me another bit of nuance about the Argentine literary tradition Borges is coming out of. Previously I had been thinking the knife fighting in his Argentine stories was a reference to gauchesca literature, the literature of the pampas; but in this foreword he writes,
Esteban EcheverrÃa was the first chronicler of the pampas; Evaristo Carriego, it appears, was the first chronicler of the arrabales [suburban slums around Buenos Aires].
There is knife fighting in gauchesca literature, but the knife fighting in the stories in Brodie's Report all takes place in the slums around Buenos Aires; the reference here is not to gauchos but to malevos.
Below the fold, a little more from the foreword, which makes Carriego's work sound fairly important to the evolution of Argentine literature. Carriego's complete works are online at Proyecto Biblioteca Digital Argentina.
Carriego could not have carried out his works without the enormous freedom of vocabulary, of theme and of meter which Modernism granted to the literatures of the Spanish tongue, both on this side and on the other side of the ocean; but the Modernism which was his stimulus was also his enemy. A good portion of Heretic Masses is given over to involuntary parody of DarÃo and of Herrera. But beyond these pages, and beyond the rest, the discovery (let's call it that) of our suburbs is the most valuable contribution of Carriego.
And
I know little of his political inclinations -- a likely guess is that he was vaguely, eloquently an anarchist. [which cf Borges' statements about his own politics in the foreword to Brodie's Report.]... He worked ceaselessly, driven by the soft mania of the tubercular. ... He died twenty-nine years of age, at the same age and of the same disease as John Keats. Both men had a hunger for fame -- [this last bit I am finding very hard to understand, not sure whether from a language problem or a complexity problem:]
la pasión era lÃcita en aquel tiempo, ajeno todavÃa a las malas artes de la publicidad.
* di Giovanni wrote an essay on "Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer," which one can read in part at Google Books.
** (Also included in Prologos is a foreword to Roberto Godel's Birth by Fire -- In "Juan Muraña," Borges mentions that Godel was in school with him and Trápani.)
↻...done
posted evening of July 4th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Prólogos
Rex Broome's 39-40 Covers project takes a turn for the fanÂtastic today (â…“ of the way through the year) with his kids coverÂing an "enterÂtainingly alarmÂing to listen to" bit of Cold War propaganda.
Harvey Pekar passed away on Monday at the age of 70. I'm sorry he is gone; loved to read his comix. I was never a fan, exactly -- I think I only own one collection of American Splendor, plus The Quitter -- it was always something I read at somebody else's recommendation. Still, worth noting his passing, and pointing out some particularly good memorial writing I've seen around the blogosphere this week:
Another artist who died on Monday (at the age of 86), who did not get as much attention in the subset of blogs that I read but whom I am in mourning for as well, is Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. Albert Amateau has written 
social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
