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.
On these pages I record and bequeath
the semi-autobiographical log,
a sort of last will and testament,
perhaps devoid of the Maestro’s
meter, rhythm and rhyme,
a run-away musical score
for a fugue in counterpoint
Colombian poet Luis Zalamea translated Prufrock into Spanish. The Fugue in Counterpoint is his own take on the poem, a take written in 1984 for the collection Voces en el desierto, with an introductory note. (The blog is duopoetico, looks very interesting, a collaboration between Zalamea and his daughter Pilar Kimbrell.)
caminamos tú y yo
se anochece en el cielo
como un borracho en el arroyo:
visitamos unos esquinas
y calles ya desconocidas
platicamos, sonreÃmos
me resulta muy difÃcil olvidar
-- The Modesto Kid
Let us go then, you and I,
the evening sprawled across the sky
just like a drunkard, passed out in the gutter.
The patrons scowl, and mutter.
-- Peter Conlay
posted morning of January 9th, 2013: 1 response ➳ More posts about Poetry
In the course of thinking about my idiot poem I came up with a metaphor that I like: Narrative structure has the function of a candle's wick. The flame of meaning will not adhere to a wick-less text. Thinking of meaning as the flame that burns in text (without consuming it), one which will dissipate if it does not have a wick, can take me in a lot of directions; one that seems especially promising is to think of song and poetry as a way of providing additional structure in which to anchor meaning so the narrative thread need not be as strong. (This ties in nicely with a take on Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must sing.")
The structure of the poem as I am seeing it now is,
The idiot cannot speak. His story is full of sound and fury raging unexpressed.
The idiot speaks. This is represented as a mechanical process, the unwinding of a clockwork. The web of his story unravels and its meaning evaporates.
The idiot sings. His sung story becomes the landscape and its meaning the universe.
The idiot falls silent, sleeps. The story he told assumes divine status i.e. pure meaning in the firmament -- its structure does not persist.
I came up with a pretty striking first line on the spot and (amazingly) remembered it later on when I had the pen and paper to hand; and the rough draft and revisions and the commentary seemed to flow pretty smoothly, naturally from the pen to the pad.
(and with that by way of introduction,) this is:
Mute
his story still untold, it's full of silent fury
and significance and void
mute like some magnificent android, and so
the idiot recounts, he counts
he builds up poetry and mountains
crumbling pottery
shards of steel, silent fountains
distant voices see him stuttering and pale and seeking
shelter from the storm of sorrow
shattering, resonant, freaking out
about the null tomorrow
and his idiotic legacy
comatose, potential
inside the eyelids snaky purple patterns weave all hectic and the
syllables shift and merge electric
inside the idiot's eyelids
posted afternoon of December 29th, 2012: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Projects
If a dream affords the dreamer some lucidity, some poetry, some regal slumber
why forget it then, why discard
the glittering shards of irreality
that pierce your consciousnessless repose
that hold your dreaming brane
like pushpins on the void
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?â€
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.â€
