Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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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 was pregnant and was composing a letter to Steve and Vera (or possibly a Facebook status with them tagged) about a model house I was building, square, boxy, yellow, the house where I wanted to live -- just straight descriptive prose, but I had gotten stuck on a sentence describing the fence which enclosed the back yard. I kept adding adjectives but could not seem to get a complete image, and the sentence was at this point several times longer than the rest of the letter.
posted morning of January 4th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
April 9th, 1948: The mob dragging the corpse of Juan Roa Sierra.
Photo W. Torres - El Tiempo.
The pavement of 7th Ave. is broken there by the tram tracks (that don't go anywhere, that get lost under the pavement, because the trams, those trams with blue-tinted windows that my father told me about, haven't existed for years), and as I, standing in front of the AugustÃn Nieto building, read the black marble plaque that describes the assassination in more sentences than strictly necessary, Sara, thinking I wasn't looking, crouched down at the curb -- I thought she was going to pick up a dropped coin -- and with two fingers touched the rail as if she were taking the pulse of a dying dog. I kept pretending I hadn't seen her, so as not to interrupt her private ceremony, and after several minutes of being a hindrance in that river of people and putting up with insults and shoves, I asked her to show me exactly where the Granada Pharmacy had been in those years when a suicidal man could buy more than 90 sleeping pills there. A year and a half after Konrad Deresser's suicide, Gaitán's murderer had been taken by force inside the pharmacy to prevent the furious mob from lynching him, but he'd been dragged from the pharmacy by the furious mob, which had punched and kicked him to death and dragged his naked body to the presidential palace (there is a photograph showing the body leaving a trail of shedded clothing behind like a snake shedding its skin: the photo isn't very good, and in it Juan Roa Sierra is barely a pale corpse, almost an ectoplasm, crossed by the black stain of his sex).
-- The Informers
posted evening of January second, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about The Informers
Looking around for background material to help me understand The Informers, I happened on an interview with the author from two years ago, in the winter 2010 issue of BOMB. Lovely reading -- always puzzling and enchanting to hear from someone so thoughtful, so clear-spoken -- and yes, some good background material to help with reading this novel.
A delightful bit of asemia that we saw at the NC museum of art: Tom Phillips*, the calligrapher replies Ⅰ.
According to the NC Museum of Art Handbook of the Collections,
"The painting is a tease. It invites and resists interpretation. Viewers can pick out a word here, a phrase there, but the artist has intentionally entrapped the content within the written maze."
*And lo and behold! I did not recognize his name -- it turns out Mr. Phillips is the author of A Humument, now available in its 5th edition and in app form for iPad.
posted evening of December 31st, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Logograms
2011 has been a long and interesting year. Here's hoping 2012 is likewise -- may we all live in interesting times!
We three went on vacation and spent from Christmas Day until this morning with Michele and Kaydi in Chapel Hill. Everyone had a good time, Ellen and I saw some lovely music in the person of Tim Stambaugh and looked wistfully at (and played a few of! and started thinking about building something similar to one of!) the instruments at the Electric Violin Shop in Durham, we all went on some fun hikes around the area.
In reading and writing news, I devoured The Crying of Lot 49, which I think I have not read since college(!) -- I remember loving it then; it had a similar impact the second time around. Have been working on a translation of Zupcic's "Who Killed You, Vinko Spolovtiva" and maybe "The Real Death of Vinko Spolovtiva" to go along with it, meaning to contact him with a couple of questions. Read and loved The Little Stranger on (I believe) Andrea's reccommendation... midway through Juan Gabriel Vásquez' masterful The Informers (another fantastic translation by Anne McLean -- and actually prior to Costaguana -- I am very happy to have learned of Juan Gabriel's work this year).
A vacation playlist. Composed over at cleek's place.
q. Marche au Camp, Laurie Hart (wow do I ever not listen to this record enough)
w. Down the Road, Flatt and Scruggs
e. Across the Universe, Robyn Hitchcock (Maxwell’s, November 04 — the linked version is the not-particularly-closest thing I could find)
r. Cumberland Blues, Fiddlin Doc Roberts (this shuffle is truly shining in the fiddle department)
t. Visions of Johanna, Chris Hintz
y. Dry Town Blues, Leake Co. Revelers
u. Cypress Grove, Vassar Clements
i. Ain’t That a Shame, Brian James (IRS Greatest Hits)
o. Ten Tiny Toes, One Baby Nose, Sol Ho’opi’i and his Novelty Quartette
p. Egyptian Cream, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians.
Really recommend checking out the Laurie Hart piece, that (Danse ce Soir) is one of those records that I forget all about for long periods and then hear a song from on shuffle and fall in love with all over.
After the shuffle I am going to go spend a while listening to Laurie Hart.
Ellen and I saw some lovely music in the person of 
