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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.
In Juan Villoro's phrase, the column is the platypus of prose.
These approaches -- and more besides -- are outlined in Jaramillo's introduction: fifty pages determined, with the help of Norman Sims and of the columnists themselves, to bring the reader to the river where this platypus bathes.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez' column this week, La crónica, o cómo ponerle cercas al rÃo, is sending me scrambling to look up references... Vásquez is here a columnist writing about understanding the genre of the column. Some of the references:
Juan Villoro
Rafael Molano and his magazine Gatopardo
magazines El Malpensante (where I have seen Vásquez' work before) and Etiqueta Negra
...one could only conclude that humanity, rather than being a ballast against the arbitrary, was, through paperwork and foms and stamps and considered judgments and all that was officialdom, its very agent. There was something amusing in the time it took the universe to make its point to this white kid who lived in a very nice suburb and who had to work really hard to add things to his list of traumas, which still consisted of lost toys and, lower down, dead grannies.
Jack Viljee, 11-year-old narrator of Jacques Strauss' The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. (my reading material in yesterday's family album post), spends the 250 pages of Strauss' first novel coming of age. Or perhaps not -- the narrator is an older Jack Viljee looking back on his childhood -- he is still a child at the end of the novel. As a reader you get the sense that the events of the story are what set in motion the process of his coming of age, which will then happen outside of the pages of the book. I reckon this is a good thing as it allows Strauss to get away with some vagueness about what growing up actually consists in, and concentrate on the immature character of his subject and his responses to those events, and to the circumstances of his childhood. Jack grows up in a northern suburb of Johannesburg, the son of a Boer father and an English mother and cared for by a black maid, unsure about where he fits in to the spectrum of South African life in the waning days of Apartheid. His discoveries and his intuitions about his family, about his friends and neighbors and schoolmates, about the society he is living in, make for great, thought-provoking reading.
Let's watch the Threepenny Opera -- online in its entirety in Criterion Films' restoration, with subtitles that can be turned on or off via the "CC" button at the bottom of the frame:
You're welcome. (And thanks for bringing this to my attention, Allan!)
posted morning of March third, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
The latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes is my arrangement of Nat King Cole's "Frim Fram Sauce" -- and right now it feels like this playlist is complete, it encapsulates my sound very nicely. I'm going to keep recording songs and uploading them to YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever other such service; but The Kitchen Tapes playlist will remain as is -- I'll start working on the next playlist. I've been doing a lot of asking friends to listen to it and link to it over the past week or so -- if you are one such friend I hope you don't mind the spamminess of it all. (And thanks for the link, cleek!) Very happy and proud about how the tapes are sounding -- I have this thought in mind that somehow if enough people put the link out, it could find an audience not composed solely of my close friends and family... If you listen to it and like what you hear, do me a favor and pass it along.
(What I mean to say, I'm really excited about having made a record.)
Latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes mix is short and sweet. It is an old fiddle tune that I've been wanting to learn for a long time; last night I went ahead and tried it out. After five or six takes I got a version I'm pretty happy with.
posted morning of February 28th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Let's listen to Jonathan Coulton singing about the Mandelbrot set. (Allow me to recommend that you watch the video at full size.) If you squint just right, you will be able to see the fractal squiggles as they approach you turning into Escherine staircases (/dragons?) descending into infinity.
A bulbous, pointy form
Let z1 = z² + c. z2 = z1² + c. z3 = z2² + c. If the series of z's will always be close to c and never trend away from c, that point is in the Mandelbrot set. Thanks for the link, Ed!
posted evening of February 24th, 2012: 6 responses
By this time
I was beginning to get very popular around that good old town of mine. I had many offers to leave Kid Ory's band, but for some time none of them tempted me. One day a redheaded band leader named Fate Marable came to see me. For over sixteen years he had been playing the excursion steamer Sydney. He was a great piano man and he also played the calliope on the top deck of the Sydney. Just before the boat left the docks for one of its moonlight trips up the Mississippi, Fate would sit down at this calliope and damn near play the keys off of it. He was certainly a grand musician.
When he asked me to join his orchestra I jumped at the opportunity. It meant a great advancement in my musical career because his musicians had to read music perfectly. Ory's men did not. Later on I found out that Fate Marable had just as many jazz greats as Kid Ory, and they were better men besides because they could read music and they could improvise. Fate's had a wide range and they played all the latest music because they could read at sight. Kid Ory's band could catch on to a tune quickly, and once they had it no one could outplay them. But I wanted to do more than fake the music all the time because there is more to music than just playing one style. I lost no time in joining the orchestra on the Sydney.
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans
Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean that you don't have to keep time.
Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play.
Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You've got to dig it, you dig?
All reet!
Reading Fug You this morning, I had a pleasant surprise -- a photo of old favorite Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band playing, and right in front is Maria D'Amato on the fiddle! I had completely forgotten she played violin, have just thought of her as a singer for years now.
So I've got some inspiration for the weekend, I want to get "Richland Woman Blues" happening on fiddle. (Also, I want to record "John Hardy was a desperate man", which I've been working on this week.)
Here is a bit of reminiscence about Maria, from Joe Boyd's White Bicycles. Joe went to the 1962 Cornell Folk Festival with Geoff Muldaur:
"We got lost on the campus and by the time we arrived the show - a double bill of Sleepy John Estes and Doc Watson - was over. At the post-gig party, the two men - both blind - sang old hymns shared by the white and black communities of the rural south. We noticed a dark-eyed beauty with a long black braid accompanying the Watson party on fiddle or keeping time with a set of bones. Geoff was too shy to talk to her, but swore that he would marry her. It was the young Maria D'Amato..."
posted evening of February 24th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Fug You
Robyn Hitchcock will be online tomorrow afternoon (2pm EST) for a live birthday chat with Roch Parisiens -- head over there now to post questions you'd like to ask of him.
Reading Fug You this morning, I had a pleasant surprise -- a photo of old favorite Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band playing, and right in front is Maria D'Amato on the fiddle! I had completely forgotten she played violin, have just thought of her as a singer for years now.
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