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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.
Thanks are due Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson of Montevidayo for making available these recordings of Raúl Zurita and his translator Daniel Borzutsky, appearing together at Notre Dame last month. They are reading from Zurita's book Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), newly published in translation.
Zurita is my favorite reader of any poet I have heard reading. Such a beautiful voice, such a magnificent connection with his words. They are tragic words and bitter, and Borzutsky's translation communicates their tragedy and their bitterness clearly -- even if he is not in Zurita's class as a reader...
Pegado, pegado a las rocas, al mar y a las montañas.
Murió mi chica, murió mi chico, desaparecieron todos.
Desiertos de amor.
posted evening of February 17th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
All the adjectives that come to mind when I seek to describe the photography of Geert Goiris are gerunds of transitive verbs -- "Stunning"; "spell-binding"; "transfixing"... Make of that what you will as I am not sure what to make of it. Goiris describes her style as "traumatic realism".
With that proverb in mind, Kirill Yuryevitch Yeskov set out to relate an alternate history of Tolkein's Middle Earth from the point of view of the losing side: Yeskov tells the story of the War of the Ring as seen by the forces of Mordor. Fascinating! Yeskov published his book ПоÑледний кольценоÑец in 1999; it does not look like a commercial translation in English will be forthcoming any time soon because the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien does not cotton to infringement on its intellectual property... But fandom to the rescue! Blogger Yisroel Markov has made available his translation of The Last Ring-Bearer (done over the course of "a few dozen lunch hours," and vetted and corrected by Eskov) for free download. Far out. Thanks, Mr. Markov! (and thanks for letting me know about this, Gabe!)
(Readers of Russian can peruse the original at lib.ru.) ...And more: an essay by Yeskov at Salon.
Stanislaus Bhor of Hermano Cerdocalls our attention to Raúl Quirós Molina's new multimedia work, Un hombre cae de un edificio, and particularly to its first story, Un dÃa soleada en Königsberg -- "A Sunny Day in Königsberg". Oh look, a hypertext adventure that lets you determine the course of the plot! Fun! A bit of a downer perhaps, compared to the old Choose Your Own Adventure young-adult books... Opening line: "At the end of this story, the protagonist -- that is to say, you yourself -- dies." Now let's figure out how that's going to come about...
Si sólo fuese el grito
del agua,
o el rodar de una piedra
que no encuentro acomodo
a la orilla del llanto.
Si sólo fuese
la herida corrosiva
de los pasos sin nombre
en los dÃas que mueren,
o la processión lenta de las horas
(centinelas del miedo).
Si sólo fuese el puñado de hierba
lo que cubre a la sangre,
aventada al olvido,
para poder decir:
es el final.
Too Late
If only it were just the scream
the water's scream,
the restless turning of a stone
which finds no spot to nestle
by the banks of the storm.
If only it were just
the wound, corrosive wound,
that nameless passage,
flow of dead time;
the soft procession of the hours
(sentinels of fear).
If only that bundle of herbs,
the ones we use to bind our wounds,
could be scattered to oblivion,
that we might say:
it is over.
I'm torn here between the beauty of the language and imagery, and a fear that I'm not really understanding the poem, am misreading and mistranslating... A more literal translation of the title is "The Juvenile Offender" -- I could not make any sense of that so I seized on an alternate meaning of "delinquent" in English, but I really have no idea if that works in Spanish.
Cárdenas Peña seems like a good poet for Valentine's Day as he is just about as Romantic as they come. Wikipædia says that he was "infatuated with beauty, with masculine beauty; he passed his thankless days in Platonic admiration of young men's bodies. The contemplation of physical beauty, the slow and sensuous writing of his poetry, the dialogues which he carried out with himself in cheap hotels and in the beds of the poorhouse -- perhaps these were the three fundamental activities of his life."
Coincidence? I've been seeing a lot of links lately to information about the Voynich manuscript. The latest is a story about physicist Greg Hodgins of the University of Arizona, who has dated the document to the 15th Century, 100 years older than it was previously thought to be. Thanks for the link, Peter!
For a high-quality, page by page scan of the manuscript, visit Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library Voynich Manuscript site, and click on the "page by page" link at the top of the page.
Borrowed Beams of Light's Kickstarter project is still going on -- they're nearly a third of the way to their goal!
It might seem peculiar to go to Saramago seeking reverence -- he is rather famously atheistic, maybe even intemperately so; he was notoriously denounced by the Catholic church heirarchy after publication of his final novel, CaÃn, when he said humanity would be better off without the Holy Bible. (And who am I, no Christian myself, to be seeking or discussing reverence? We'll leave that question by the side for now.) But: I found The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to be a superlatively reverent book, that quality was one of my favorite things about the book; and I am hoping as I start CaÃn that it will share that quality.
Things are looking a little dodgy starting with the epigraph -- Saramago quotes chapter 11, verse 4 of St. Paul's letter to the Hebrews, and attributes it to the Libro de los disparates, roughly the "Book of Nonsense". I agree with Rafael RodrÃguez Hernández that this is a lousy opening: it seems to me like Saramago ought to treat his source text with more respect...
Be that as it may, I'm enjoying the first few chapters. Eve and Adam are coming through nicely as characters, Saramago seems really to be interested in their humanity and their hardships. It looks like it will be a fun game to figure out which of Saramago's details are canonical and which are not -- for instance he has only a single Cherub guarding the gates of Eden, whom he identifies as Azael*; tradition assigns this role to two angels, Metatron and Melchisadec. But I will probably spend less time on this kind of thing as I get deeper into the story. Eve's flirtation with and implicit seduction of Azael is very strongly non-canonical/blasphemous, but it is rendered so lovingly that I am going to go along with it -- it is one of the high points of the first few chapters.
*Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels identifies Azael as "one of 2 fallen angels (Aza is the other) who cohabited with Naamah, Lamech's daughter, and sired the sedim, Assyrian guardian spirits." Cool! I knew vaguely (based on Genesis 6:1-2) that there was angel-human cohabitation in the Abrahamic tradition but did not have any specifics.
posted afternoon of February 12th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Cain
In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Greenblatt speculates on Shakespeare's editorial process; meanwhile the blogger at Little Bits of Ice is speculating about Shakespeare's motivations.
Scott McÂLemee of Inside Higher Edwrites about the King James Bible and about David Crystal's new analysis of its language, and about James Agee's use of the book of Sirach. 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the translation.
But: I found The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to be a superlatively reverent book, that quality was one of my favorite things about the book; and I am hoping as I start CaÃn that it will share that quality.
speculates
writes