Liberty is not a woman walking the streets, she is not sitting on a bench waiting for an invitation to dinner, to come sleep in our bed for the rest of her life.
This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
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.
Midnight's oil is inky black, it shimmers
in the orange glow of the match you've struck
Midnight's oil is an inky puddle in your cerebellum
There is no wick in midnight's oil
but will it burn? Hesitant
you drop the match
it hisses and dies
in your moist consciousness
and you feel the dark embrace
of midnight's oil
midnight's oil swells, becomes
itself
the fabric of your consciousness
no claustrophobia here nor displacement, indeed
the opposite
a warmth one might say, a carnal pleasure
in the closeness of midnight's oil
you get a pleasant contact high from midnight's oil
indeed in its glow you sense a new path
new vision
come quickly to love the way it burns
pale blue flame, dim flame, warm flame
illuminates you, passes through the membrane
separating self and your surroundings
And so you're out there now and everything's burning
burning in quiet joy, in dim blue ecstasy
but what can you do when everything's on fire
but fiddle
take your cue
the camera pans in close on Nero's graying braided hair
and the hair of his bow slides quickly
sometimes sloppy on the strings
which are burning too
and none of it consumed like Rome was
and from this ubiquitous burning bush hear the voice
of midnight's oil deep and resonant asemic
hear the syllables
neither skatting nor as they might appear
some ancient language dead and never traced
nor yet a new invention
timeless nonsense tripping
from the nonexistent lips of transcendent midnight's oil
what madness will this incantation work?
posted afternoon of December first, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Poetry
I spent a few weeks in October working on a translation of his "Canto de guerra de las cosas" that I had started and abandoned a couple of years ago. What a great poem this is!
Searching for more about him led me to find some of Chris Brandt's translations -- I was particularly floored by his version of "Hotel Tremol", which you can hear John John reading on YouTube.
From Brandt's translations I was inspired to buy Pasos' PoesÃa completa, which is available in a very nice edition being remaindered at Amazon.es -- with shipping included it is ~$12. (You should buy it if you read Spanish.)
I'm just blown away by the poems -- it is premature to talk about favorites at this point but already with the very second poem in the book, "Cook «Voyages»," we are among the very highest ranks of poetic imagery.
Opportunistically lying in wait and grinning, giggling lamely at the ashy glow of the painted wall in the streetlamp and suddenly hear a dead man walking round the corner and the dying fall
You're making up your mind and nervous, humming inanely snatches of the anthem of your good old school out west; forgotten the words and meanings subtle meaninglessness, your time has not yet come so you play the fool
And suddenly crumpling and falling, lifeless, playing a wrinkled fool, to an audience of jaded friends
You're running now frantic feel the rhythmic pace and all the scenery's the same just one repeated shot flickers past and you could swear you've been out here before Mr. Hitchcock; and this stupid mistake will not be your last
not the last of such creatures entrusted and painted and lined
with precious gems, heirloom for a generation
of bureaucrats --
you switch back now and look him full in the face
and suddenly you find you cannot recognize this familiar caricature, this crudely sketched archetype of disquiet, or you do not want to (and so you fail to), unfamiliar expression you know so well, could trace it out in the dark you reckon soft ivory fingers on imaginary skin and so you stare into his absent eyes and identify yourself with his absent character and longing
(walking with Pixie the morning of the storm)
the textures and sounds of Autumn, and the foreboding, are easily as invigorating as the gorgeous colors.
Crunchy autumn sidewalk in Maplewood? Or the world's most frustrating jigsaw puzzle?
It was a lot of fun to hear D.T. Max reading from his new biography of DFW at Words Bookstore in Maplewood. I am looking forward to reading it; and in particular I am taken with the title. Max says it is an expression Wallace made use of repeatedly in letters throughout his career, and generally without context. It rings true for me in ways I haven't quite been able to sort out yet. (Max said he was surprised, at each stage of the editorial process, at being able to keep the title he had chosen.)
For example this statement seems like it would make a really good epigraph (mutatis mutandis) for Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet -- a book I finished reading this weekend and which I'm recommending wholeheartedly, by the by -- I wonder if it is some sort of postmodern commonplace. This association of love with absence. Both Rushdie and Wallace I think are very concerned with the irreality of the world about which they are trying to write realistically; and maybe this in a way implies that loving someone (as Maria loves Ormus, as otherworldly Rai loves otherworldly Vina) is a way of escaping into their reality from your own irreality, of becoming a ghost. (And this in turn can be seen as a metaphor for the process of reading the novel and identifying with its characters, coming full circle.)
The irritation I felt at Rai's voice throughout the first part of the novel faded about halfway through (indeed about the time I figured out what was making me feel irritated, I started to feel more sympathy for him) -- and in the last 150 pages or so I really started loving his voice (which changed a bit at that point in the story -- he grew in a way that brought more sincerity into his voice).
A mix tape (is mix tape the right term here? Something like a playlist but including readings and videos as well as music...) (and whew! there is something unfamiliar about blogging in English!): The ordering of the playlist is my own chain of memory (with proddings from others) starting from chapter 7, "More than love", of The ground beneath her feet.
Ormus speaks. I have been liking this novel while being rubbed a little the wrong way by the narrator's voice -- Rai seems a little off to me, a little cynical and annoyingly, smugly verbose. I found quite striking the short piece in the middle of this chapter that shifts into Ormus' voice, and into him quoting his father's voice. His mention of vultures and of Attar, and of Prometheus, got me into a "classical birds" frame of mind. Ormus speaks, read by The Modesto Kid
Attar's poem in Fitzgerald's stellar translation, The Bird Parliament. (This would be an amazing poem for reading out loud -- I tried that earlier and got about a ¼ of the way into it... I may have to upload a recording of this to SoundCloud.)
I'm also put in mind a little of Borges' mysticism, in a way I have not been by this novel so far -- the bits of magic in Rai's narration have been undone by his glibness. Specifically The Theologians I guess, though I don't recall there being birds in that.
