If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.
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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.
Happy St. Paddy's, all you serpent-haters! Some of my favorite early musical memories are of listening to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem on my dad's stereo, singing Irish drinking songs. Here are two versions of "A Jug of Punch":
posted afternoon of March 17th, 2012: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Music
I've just seen a face,
I can't forget the time or place
That we'd just met, she's just the girl for me
And I want all the world to see we've met
Na na na na na na
Had it been another day
I might have looked the other way
But I had never been aware
And as it is I dream of her tonight
Na na na na na na
CHORUS:
Falling, yes I am falling
And she keeps calling me back again
I have never known
The likes of this, I've been alone
And I have missed things and kept out of sight
But other girls were never quite like this
Na na na na na na
CHORUS
I've just seen a face
I can t forget the time or place
And we'd just met, she's just the girl for me
And I want all the world to see we've met
Na na na na na na
Emily tries but misunderstands, ah ooh
She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dreams till tomorrow
There is no other day
Let's try it another way
You'll lose your mind at play
Free games till may
See Emily play
Soon after dark Emily cries, ah ooh
Gazing through trees in sorrow hardly a sound till tomorrow
There is no other day
Let's try it another way
You'll lose your mind and play
Free games for may
See Emily play
Put on a gown that touches the ground, ah ooh
Float on a river forever and ever, Emily
There is no other day
Let's try it another way
You'll lose your mind and play
Free games for may
See Emily play
↻...done
posted evening of March 16th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Syd Barrett
How exciting: the current issue of Guernica features the first half of the story "Things", from Saramago's short story collection Objecto Quase (1978) -- the second half will be published in April. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time any of these stories has been seen in English translation. The full collection will be published by Verso Books at the end of April, under the title The Lives of Things. Really great news -- Saramago's signature style begins to take shape in these stories, and themes that will occupy his writing throughout his career.
It is also great news to see that the translation is by Giovanni Pontiero, the master who translated so many of Saramago's early books before his untimely death in 1996. Clearly the translation has been out there for a long time, at last it will be available to the public.
Speaking of translation -- I had good news today, word from the editors of Words Without Borders that they'll be publishing my translation of Fernando Iwasaki's "A Troya, Helena," my project of last weekend. It will appear in their April issue.
Christopher Jobson of Colossal has posted an interview with Anna Schuleit, along with some pictures of her spectacular installation at the former site of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. (via Heebie-Geebie)
Spent this weekend working on a translation of Fernando Iwasaki's A Troya, Helena, and I think I came up with a pretty convincing rendering by this morning's (submitted) draft. A couple of fun bits from researching meanings in this short story:
"Helena habÃa resistido demasiado, más de lo que se
le podÃa pedir a una chica que se casa a los veinte años con un
huevón de oficio pero sin beneficio."
I spent a while trying to figure out "de oficio pero sin beneficio" -- my first guess was that the narrator was referring to himself as a jerk "with a job but with no money," which would sort of fit the story but not particularly add much to it... Mariana laughed when she saw the phrase and said he is calling himself un "heuvón de oficio", i.e. an asshole by trade, and then bringing in the phrase "sin oficio ni beneficio" to say he was not doing well even in that chosen trade.
"Parissi se esmeraba en prolongar el último
orgasmo de Helena hasta el lÃmite de las gunfias."
It took me a long time to get anywhere with this last word, and I'm still not quite comfortable with it. It turns out to be a word from Cortázar's invented jargon glÃglico, from Hopscotch. I've taken what might be the coward's way out and rendered it as gunphies, which is the word Rabassa uses in his tranlation, out of a desire to keep the Hopscotch reference intact. (And yes, Cortázar is another big hole in my literacy...)
Daniel González Dueñas says, in his post on glÃglico (which is based on the Porteño dialect Lunfardo), that ‘gunfia’ is an apheresis of ‘esgunfiola’ and can be used to mean ‘boredom’ or ‘disgust’; that “hasta el lÃmite de las gunfiasâ€
is something like (if I'm reading right) "as far as propriety will allow." Which sounds, well, a little strange in the context in which it occurs here; but the narrator is a very strange dude to be sure. Maybe "for as long as she would let him."
The Pacific is really a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that the earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. ...
What will the new day illuminate? I'd like to give you a very fast answer because I'm losing the words to tell you, the survivors, this tale.
I started looking at Carlos Fuentes' Destiny and Desire (tr. Edith Grossman) this weekend -- I must say this book is going to take me a long, long time to read. It is a thick enough book to be sure, more than 500 pages; but what is slowing it down for me is the inability to start anywhere else besides the first page when I pick the book up. I've read the opening pages several times over now and they are not losing any of their appeal.
Fun bit of intertextuality -- last thing I remember reading that is narrated by a murder victim, was the opening chapter of My Name is Red. So Destiny and Desire (a title I find corny, oh well) is starting out with a very positive association... Fuentes is a bit of a hole in my literary experience -- I made a couple of stabs fairly recently at Artemio Cruz but got nowhere -- this new book sure seems at first impressions like it will be a good place to start.
posted evening of March 11th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
In last night's dream, I was listening to a radio program devoted to pop standards whose original versions were written about, or in, Modesto, CA. This was followed by a number of secondary dreams concerned with explicating and recording the original dream -- the secondary dreams were not always clear on the "dream" status of the original dream.
Only song I remember at all from the radio program, is a Hank Williams-y tune that started out, "Standin on the corner, waitin for the bus to Oakland, or Encina; and if the bus don't come,..."
posted morning of March 6th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
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.
At Cracked, Seanbaby does crack statistical work to determine which 7 words are only in titles of bad movies... This article is filled with really choice lines, such that if you don't spend at least as much time laughing as reading it, your sense of humor is quite different from mine. (Thanks for the link, Kevin!)
