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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.
Currently reading Nostromo on the subway to and from work, The Lives of Things and (very, very slowly) Manual de pintura y caligrafÃa* for weekend reading, and making plans to open up and read and write about Antigua vida mÃa as my contribution to the Spanish Lit Month which Richard of Caravana de recuerdos will with his various co-conspirators be hosting in July. Here is a snippet of reading experience from this weekend --
One could say that the chair about to topple is perfect. In what sense? "complete" certainly -- is the implication here that perfection is death?
Two books in hand on Sunday morning, Sunday morning, pleasant summer Sunday in South Orange, in the village where I live. The orderly torrent of yellow luxurious sunlight amazes me, soft on my skin like satin.
I open up The lives of things and read about the Chair, about the bench beneath me, the allegory's still not crystal clear to me, I'm happy though to dig the plain, the superficial meaning of the words and phrases, marvel at the beauty of the key instead of trying it in its lock.
*(And what, precisely, is the point (you will ask) of reading Saramago in Spanish translation, a novel which is available in English translation, in translation by Pontiero no less? Not sure. But I am having fun with it...)
Here is the utterly beguiling epigraph Saramago chose for his short stories:
If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human.
It is from Chapter 6 of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians which was their first collaborative effort. Saramago's method of carrying out this transformation of the environment, while I cannot imagine it to be just what Marx and Engels had in mind, is somehow exactly the right thing.
posted evening of June third, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
In Pontiero's translation, Saramago calls silence the "universal synonym, the omnivalent" -- a basis, a bottom layer to the intricate sediment of meaning which accretes as sounds are given voice and associated with their meanings. As these fluid meanings set and stick and harden, deepen, language diverges, attaining "a variety of words which never say the same thing, however much we might want them to. If they were to say the same thing, if they were to group together through affinity of structure and origin, then life would be much simpler, by means of successive" erosions of the sediment. Perhaps it is implicit here that this destructive simplification is/was a goal of Salazar*, the "poor wretch" sitting in the termite-eaten chair in its last moments as chair, but I may be reading this in.
*And a million thanks to Pontiero's introduction for elucidating this supremely important detail -- when I was reading this story in Spanish last year, I could mostly understand and make sense of the words and sentences, but was unable absent this critical bit of backstory to put them together into anything like a meaningful whole. Wikipædia says,
I spent this morning reading Saramago in Spiotta Park, where the geniuses of Rebel Yarns had conspired to give the park a surrealistic makeover as part of the South Orange Maplewood Artists' Studio Tour. Click thru for pix.
Mountain Station's set last night at Desmond's Tavern went off very nicely. The 8:00 set was Grain Thief, whose music was entirely copacetic to ours (and who has just quit his job to pursue music full time -- best of luck to you, Patrick!) -- when we arrived around 8:15 he was playing a tune from our songbook, "Angel From Montgomery". We had about 7 people show up to hear our set, plus Patrick and several of his friends stuck around to hear us; felt like a nice crowd.
Our gear took only about 5 minutes to set up and we launched right into our set, and played for a good 45 minutes or so. The list was a good mix of songs we've been playing for a long time with new songs:
Drowsy Maggie/ Dancing Barefoot
Meet Me in the Morning
Swallowtail Jig/ Galway Girl
Red Overalls
Cole Durhew
The L&N don't stop here anymore
Highway 61
NJ Transit
Praying Mantis
Get up high, come down easy
A great advantage to the size and acoustic nature of our band -- after we broke our gear down and listened for a while to the 10:00 act (Queen Orlenes, whose lead singer is the spitting image of a young Grace Slick and has the voice to match), we headed out and were able to take a walk -- no amps to lug around! -- in the technicolor glory of New York at night. We went down to Madison Square Park and chilled out over a burger and fries at the Shake Shack, before we headed back out to Jersey.
Am Am(sus)
Finding aptly chilling epitaphs in Robyn Hitchcock lyrics,
Am Em
All I want to do is fall in love while there's still time
Am Am(sus)
Sitting crosswise on the centerpiece and shining off the mantlepiece
Am Am(sus) Am
A skull, a suitcase and a long red bottle of wine.
I was playing in a pubful, of afternoon drinkers
And I asked them as I strummed my guitar, who's got all the chunes
And he crawled along a centipede and rode on his velocipede
Cutting paper napkins into little crescent moons
Tom and Kevin citing happily the sages of their destiny
His living words were dying words he smiled and he said "Yeah"
Searching sadly for that bluegum you can take my eyes I've used 'em
Searching sadly for a quaint old fashioned way to say goodbye
"Very well," had said the considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand. There would be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic. So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and -- a Government; or rather, two Governments -- two South American Governments. And you know what came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould."
Somehow I had gotten in mind from The Secret History of Costaguana, that Nostromo held specific allegoric reference to the building of the Panama Canal. That does not seem to be quite right... Certainly the story of the Canal is a relevant line of thought for approaching this book; and the Atacama, too -- nitrate was of huge importance when Conrad was writing this.
posted evening of May 29th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Nostromo
In his 7th chapter, "The Dethronement of Cronus" (full text of the book is here), Graves slips in a fun quick reference to Epimenides' paradox:
Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horseherds. And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is reburied.
posted afternoon of May 28th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
We spent some time this morning reading Graves' take on The Gods of the Underworld, comparing the details to the stories she knows from Riordan's novels...
posted morning of May 28th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Book Shops
This morning found the three of us walking along the boardwalk that runs through the Great Swamp preserve -- it's not too far away from us (15 miles maybe), but I hardly ever get a chance to visit. Today was a wonderful day for it. Click thru 4 pix.
In Pontiero's translation, Saramago calls silence the "universal synonym, the omnivalent" -- a basis, a bottom layer to the intricate sediment of meaning which accretes as sounds are given voice and associated with their meanings. As these fluid meanings set and stick and harden, deepen, language diverges, attaining "a variety of words which never say the same thing, however much we might want them to. If they were to say the same thing, if they were to group together through affinity of structure and origin, then life would be much simpler, by means of successive" erosions of the sediment. Perhaps it is implicit here that this destructive simplification is/was a goal of Salazar*, the "poor wretch" sitting in the termite-eaten chair in its last moments as chair, but I may be reading this in. 
