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.
Parecido a las otras utilizaciones de los labios y las manos, como sonreÃr, acariciar, enfurruñarse y pegar puñetazos, el ruido vocal hace enlaces entre la gente que desean o necesitan ser conectado -- para el apoyo reciproco o para establecer la jerarquÃa o para declarar la hostilidad, por ejemplo. Asà vemos que la canguro que hace monerÃas al niño realiza un acción lingüistica similar en general al escolar ambicioso que me saluda con un tono ascendente en la última sÃlaba del «Good morning, sir.» Y si esas acciónes sean comunicaciones, entonces necesitamos redefinir la comunicación: no como la transmisión entre A y B de estados mentales, menos aún como la transmisión de «informaciones», sino como la establecimiento, el refuerzo, la modificación de relaciones interpersonales del momento. Y serÃa mejor decir, no es comunicación, sino lenguaje. El lenguaje es una manera humana de relacionar a otros seres humanos.
...
El cuento de Babel se equivoca: el uso primordial del discurso humano fue más probable ser diferente, no el mismo.
(Update as of Saturday): We played the set through tonight and it took just about one hour. If we do everything the same speed on Thursday and without any screw-ups (there were a couple tonight which stretched the set out slightly), we will probably have space to play one more song, which will probably be NJ Transit.
There aren't any words in the Bible anyways, let alone jokes,
I wouldn't worry so much about translating it,
about being swept into its blank void,
slipping frictionless and lucid across its empty page.
Those who have preceded you have left no spoor, no trace,
that you can make out anyways, and yet you know
full well their journey and retrace it.
Rilke asked who'd hear him,
among the choirs of heaven or
among the rankèd Angels or among their hierarchy, or something,
if he cried out -- and your throat is still,
your sigh is dead a-borning. Candle's flicker casts its shadows
among the ranked symbols and their blanknesses,
their blacknesses:
this yellowing forest of text.
posted evening of February first, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Poetry
There aren't any words in the Bible anyways, let alone jokes,
I wouldn't worry so much about translating it,
about being swept into its blank void,
slipping frictionless and lucid across its empty page.
Those who have preceded you have left no spoor, no trace,
that you can make out anyways, and yet you know
full well their journey and retrace it.
Some idle Googling the other day brought me to Mercedes GarcÃa-Arenal and Fernandez RodrÃguez-Mediano's essay on Miguel de Luna, Arabic Christian from Granada and thence to de Luna's True History of King Roderic... Lots to read... (And can it really be true that de Luna's True History has never been translated into English? It seems strange to think such a thing but I am not finding it anywhere. This looks like a pretty key bit of history of literature to me...)
posted evening of February first, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Don Quixote
Examinando más tarde la declaración del San Jerónimo -- Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor me in interpretatione Graecorum absque scripturis sanctis ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu -- escribe Bellos que el San Jerónimo quizás trataba sobre un verdadero problema para los traductores: ¿cómo tratar los expresiones que no entiendes? En la lectura y la plática cotidiana nos acostumbramos a pasar por encima de tales expresiones, el sentido interpretando del contexto.
Peter of Conscious Entitieslinks to a talk on theories of consciousness by Eric Schwitzgebel, author of Perplexities of Consciousness. Check it out: a thoroughly interesting presentation. (Note that Schwitzgebel's claim that countries should be considered conscious entities is completely compatible with Jaynes' idea of consciousness as a metaphorical, language-based activity.)
There aren't any words in the Bible anyways, let alone jokes, 
