The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.
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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.
To make your shadow dance, dance. To make your shadow talk, stand on a streambank.
Learn from your shadow. Broken glass won’t cut it, barbed wire can’t stop it, mud doesn’t stick.
Dave Bonta of Via Negativa today posted How to Cast a Shadow, the 27th and final poem in his series Manual. Go read (and if you likeby all means, listen to his recitations) -- some great stuff is present. Start from the beginning! You have to start from a position of strength. Leave a window open for cat-burglars and cats, either of whom may have a lot to teach you.
Today I happened on another story by Zupcic, "Girasoles Funeral Home: The Autobiography of a Hearse" -- here we learn the (rather sordid) story of Bárbula Copies, after Benavides and his friends graduate and sell out to the fat lady who runs the numbers game next door.
— Death takes us all. — That was all we would say when customers asked us how we had made the decision to go into the funeral home business here next to the medical school, when they asked us how we could have chosen such a name for our business as Bárbula Copies.
I had forgotten about the fifth chapter of The Art of Resurrection -- it is an extremely dense, 7-page long paragraph of a sort of context-switching stream of consciousness. Last time I read this book, I'm pretty sure I mostly skipped over it. It is valuable for the way it gets inside Zárate Vega's head, and by switching back and forth between the narrator's voice and the Christ of Elqui's, makes explicit the identification between reader and writer and character -- also we see the use of first-person plural, not used in this book anything like as much in Santa MarÃa de las flores negras, to make explicit the identification between the narrator and the workers who live in the salitreras.
“War is hell,†said Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration: he said it following the killing of 16 civilians, among them children, by a deranged sergeant in the Afghan province of Kandahar. This massacre unleashed on the world a series of images that one cannot look at without being reminded of similar massacres from the Vietnam War — for instance, My Lai.
The Utopian's blog publishes my translation of Vásquez' latest column for El Espectador: the original is "Los Avergonzados", from last Thursday.
On the subject of shameful killings: Founderstein's Michael Austin has exactly the right take on the killing of Treyvon Martin in Florida last month. (via Russell Arben Fox)
Chapter 3 of The Art of Resurrection is more setting-up of the story, as Zárate Vega makes his way from Los Dones to Sierra Gorda, the closest railway stop to Providencia. There is a lot to like about the writing and the scenery here, but I am aching for the real story to start in Chapter 4.
What happens when Mountain Station tries playing an old Irish drinking song? Liam Clancy says of this song that it's like St. Patrick's Day in the way it starts out beautifully melodic and rapidly deteriorates.
Well I think we have a bit of a head start on the deterioration aspect of it... With a little practice I think this is going to become a core bit of the Mountain Station catalog.
Practice with John this afternoon was composed exclusively of almost-new and brand-new songs.
"Chinese Bones" -- we've abortively tried playing this a couple of times before, today was the first time it really came together, through the magical-seeming addition of a short capo on the second fret.
"Old Joe Clark" -- we've played this once or twice, how could we not have, but not for a long time. Sounded really nice.
"See Emily Play" -- this one will take some work, I'm excited about doing that work.
"Jug of Punch" -- we tried playing this (in honor of the Saint's day) a couple of times, it was sounding ok, suddenly John got the idea to speed it way up and completely alter the melody of it; and all of a sudden it was a Mountain Station song! Really fantastic. I will post a video later on.
"I've Just Seen a Face" -- what fun. We haven't done any Beatles covers but this one might be a keeper.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. ... I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.
In the NY Times Sunday Review*, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri reflects on the "urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another" -- I empathize with her as far as this being a primary motivation. I love her description of reading Italian, which captures perfectly how I enjoy reading Spanish.
I sometimes underline sentences too, though I don't remember having done so in college -- it's a habit come by recently, until only a few years ago I could not hilight a book without its feeling forced and unproductive. Just last night I started a reread of The Art of Resurrection, which happily contains lots of underlining and margin notes from 2010. I believe a part of blogging my reread is going to be quoting from these, seeing if I am still finding these artfully arranged bunches of words to hold the same beauty and enchantment, how my reactions have evolved over the time since I first read it -- which time of course includes my translation of and revising of the first chapter , and reading Santa Maria de las flores negras...
I'm thinking I'll try to keep fairly good bloggy notes about this reread. (As for Chapter 1 though, I am going to let my translation stand without discussing it.)
The second chapter (which I call "In Transit" in my notes) is slightly tedious compared to the opening (although, well, what would not be) -- there is a shift of tense from the imperfect narrative to a remembered preterite, the camera zooms out for a little setting up of the plot of the book. Here Magalena Mercado is introduced (again not in person, but via a story told by a traveling salesman) and we get some of Zárate Vega's back story.
My only hilight in this chapter is the last line -- ¡Aleluya, Padre Santo! -- where I note a transition into Zárate Vega's voice. Switches between tenses and between voices are a very, very important part of this novel I think -- based on the two books I've read of Rivera Letelier's it seems to me like these switches are almost the key feature of his prose style. In this regard, the Christ of Elqui makes an ideal character for Rivera Letelier to draw.
* and/or in the online "opinionator" section of the Times website? I am no longer sure with this newspaper what is the print organ and what is the digital presence. This piece is certainly printed on the front page of the "Review" section of the hardcopy Times delivered to my stoop this morning. However its url identifies it as part of the site's blog section -- perhaps there is no longer any distinction to be made between these venues.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Rereading
At the LA Times blogs, Carolyn Kellogg posts an interview with Jonathan Lethem about Chronic City, which sounds fantastic. (Thanks for the link, Gary!)
Sam Gordon of The White Review has a lovely interview with Margaret Jull Costa regarding her practice of translation. "Doubt is very much a feature of my working day, and an essential one at that." (via Bifurcaria Bifurcata)
