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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.
Crabfu Artworks presents a walking machine powered by Princess, a pet Roborovski Dwarf Hamster -- huge fun and quite confusing for the Crabfu cat... The machine is a miniature version of Theo Jansen's Strandbeest PVC pipe creations which wander the beaches of Holland. Here is a 3sat Kulturzeit program on Jansen and his creatures:
Jansen gave a TED talk about his project in March, 2007.
...Also fun: Jansen and his pets make their appearance on Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention (a show of whose existence I am happy to learn... a few other episode clips on this playlist on Youtube).
Blogger Alison Sampson has uploaded scans of Alberto Breccia's comic El hombre azul (1978) -- thanks for the link, Domingos! Breccia was an Argentine cartoonist, working from the mid-20th-Century to the 90's; definitely looks worth finding out more about him. I see he illustrated texts by Ernesto Sabato, Lovecraft, and Poe, among others...
posted morning of February 19th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Comix
...but the leading contender by a long shot (AOTW)* is my second choice, Sciencemastering Lair. Go over to Scenes from a Multiverse to cast your vote for your favorite Famous Destination -- whichever destination wins gets a full week of story-line (next week? I am not sure. It seems like a lot of cartooning to get together on very short notice. Possibly it is the following week or something.)
(I really, really hope Bunnies Planet is not the eventual winner, much as I love it. But also hope that whatever strip wins has Bunnies Planet incorporated into it somehow.)
...A candid shot of Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer is up at Jamie Zawinski's site, jwz.org.
*...And the pattern is holding up; as of Sunday afternoon it is Sciencemastering Lair way out ahead with 55% of the vote, Outer Suburbitron dead last with a measly 6%. Bunnies Planet is dead center between them.)
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."
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.
speculates