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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Last night and this morning, I added another feature to the site, which you might not notice if you don't use my blogroll often; but it's a neat feature so I'm going to tell you about it. The expandable categories in the blogroll will now remember between invocations of the site, whether they are open or not; so if you click on "Blogs | Politics" and then visit Obsidian Wings, next time you come to READIN, the Blogs | Politics links will be open. A little thing but I had been wanting to do it for a few months now. Ideally I would like to have the categories be prefaced by a "+" or "-" character to indicate that there is material beneath them; right now you just have to know that something is there "because it looks like a blogroll", which doesn't seem ideal. I think this is within my Javascript programming abilities, look for it to happen sometime in the next month or two. Also, I improved the formatting of the indentations in the blogroll. I had been doing it with blocks of characters; instead I am now using <span>s with padding-left. This means that long link titles wrap with a hanging indent rather than wrapping to the leftmost column; much prettier.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Wild -- I dreamt last night that the print edition of The Nation had a column of reader comment about blogs, and that someone using the handle "erms" (a sneaky pseud for Emerson? was my first thought) had written in to say READIN was "the second Google hit for anything book-related" and "the most consistently boring blog on the Internet". And I'm such a publicity hound, I was lapping it up! In the dream I was posting something here to the effect of "should I feel flattered or consider packing it in?" as an excuse for linking to the article.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
For a while my A string has been fraying and in need of replacement -- tonight I put a new string on. Well a couple of things about this: it took a frustratingly long time to get it on and wound properly, a job that should take less than a minute. So I'm frustrated about not being skillful at it. But more, I don't like how long it took me to get around to doing it -- I get intimidated by stuff like this in a really not useful way. Both of these things are also true of sharpening knives, and it drives me crazy that all the knives in my kitchen and most of the blades in my wood shop are not sharp the way they ought to be, and how intimidated I get at the thought of making them sharp. I'm not sure how to approach this.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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I bought a painting! Ragebunny is making me a print and soon the violin birds will be looking down benignly* on my desk. Exciting!
 *(Perhaps better, "frantically".)
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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Look, Horton Hears a Who is not Dr. Seuss' best work. It has some nice moments, but if you spend any time thinking about it you quickly realize that 1, Horton is doing the Whos a massive disservice by interfering with their destiny and 2, the whole thing is pretty sappy. But whatever, the pictures are great, the poetry is great, it's a fun book. A really good animated short could probably be made out of it. (My dream of a live-action production with no dialog, probably not something that would ever come to pass.) Expanding it into a feature film was a really bad idea, because it meant that the film-makers had to dwell at great length on the incoherencies of the plot and insert lots new poorly-fitting stuff as well. (The whole plot line about politics in Whoville was totally lame, even though it produced as a happy accident, one interesting moment where the idea that the Whos had to prove their existence to the outside world was inverted; also the plotline about the Mayor's relationship with his son -- lame and tacked-on, no relationship to the rest of the movie.) So, Sylvia is having Kaydi over to spend the night -- as a prelude to they festivities we went over to the South Orange cinema. The girls loved the film and your kids probably will too, but try and get somebody else to take them. Or find a way of bringing some powerful intoxicants along, that would probably make the movie worth while. (OTOH, if you've got powerful intoxicants handy, there are much more interesting ways you could make use of them.) Some of the visuals, particularly the outdoor shots of Whoville, are lovely; though sad to say Horton and the kangaroo, the visual centerpieces of the film, are pretty uninteresting. The Rube Goldberg musical machine the mayor's son builds at the end is totally splendid.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 14th, 2008
We are watching Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun tonight -- I am finding I like the actors and director a lot but without identifying very closely with the movie. It is pleasing to be able to recognize dribs and drabs of the language, even if it is almost all words like "sister", "brother", "I", "you", "he", "thanks"... The lighting is very poorly done, it seems like the worst part of the movie -- it totally does not show that a scene is taking place at midnight, if it is in a darkened room with the windows brightly illuminated.
posted evening of March 14th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Jerry and I practiced this evening for the first time in about a month, and it was productive. We're going to play the open mic at Tierney's next week; our set will be chosen from this list: - Weary Day
- The Louisville Burglar
- Bed on Your Floor
- K.C. Moan
- John Hardy was a Desperate Man
There are other songs we can play pretty well but those five are solid. If you're around Montclair next Thursday evening, come by and check us out. (The fiddle lessons that I have just, in the same past month as we have not practiced, started taking, seemed to really be paying off -- along with the increased amount of practicing I am doing on my own to support them: I was feeling much more confident with rhythms and starting to see some new ornamentations I could apply to vary the melodies and harmonies I play. Also, double stops! Few and hesitant to be sure, but palpable double stops.)
posted evening of March 13th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 8th, 2008
Listening in the car to Robyn Hitchcock's April '96 concert in Bilbao, and Sylvia says "I want to hear the one about the street." Cool -- I fast-forwarded to "De Chirico Street". Listened for a minute and then Sylvia says, "There's too much stuff happening on that street." 
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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So the first melody I came up with whilst riffing on "Mama Tried", was apparently this one -- not sure how exactly, it doesn't sound much like "Mama Tried" at all.
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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Never use epigraphs -- they kill the mystery in the work!
-- Adli
If that's how it has to die, go ahead and kill it; then kill the false prophets who sold you on the mystery in the first place!
-- Bahti
This morning I started reading The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk -- and as I read the first pages I had the immediate sensation of having come home. Now the context for this is having felt really strongly drawn into the writing in Snow and My Name is Red, and digging Other Colors to the point of identifying the speaker of the words as myself; and then being less impressed by The New Life and The White Castle. Now this book is definitely holding out promise of having been written by the mature Pamuk, the one who entrances me utterly. (It was written before The New Life, which surprises me a little.) What really struck me was the intensity of my reaction -- the palpable shock of recognition I felt starting from the very first sentence. ("Rüya* was lying facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt.") I've only even known who this guy is for less than a year but I've apparently given him lease on a substantial portion of my cerebral cortex. Not too much organized yet to say about this particular book, I'm just starting it; but it does seem worth noting that the switching back and forth between first person and third person narration is so smooth and natural, it took me a few paragraphs to even figure out it had happened, the first couple of times he did it. Subtly beautiful. It took longer to figure out what was going on with Chapter Two, which is a column written by the narrator's cousin, but once I had gotten that it was good. Pamuk seems to be anticipating me -- when I have a question about some detail of the plot it seems to be getting answered within 2 or 3 pages of where it arises. It's just really hard to resist giving a long quote. Here is a bit from the first page: Languid with sleep, Galip gazed at his wife's head: Rüya's chin was nestling in the down pillow. The wondrous sights playing in her mind gave her an unearthly glow that pulled him toward her even as it suffused him with fear. Memory, Celâl had once written in a column, is a garden. Rüya's gardens, Rüya's gardens... Galip thought. Don't think, don't think, it will make you jealous! But as he gazed at his wife's forehead, he still let himself think.He longed to stroll among the willows, acacias, and sun-drenched climbing roses of the walled garden where Rüya had taken refuge, shutting the doors behind her. But he was indecently afraid of the faces he might find there: Well, hello! So you're a regular here too, are you? It was not the already identified apparitions he most dreaded but the insinuating male shadows he could never have anticipated: Excuse me, brother, when exactly did you run into my wife, or were you introduced?... And it goes on from there -- this seductive prose (in Maureen Freely's translation, and hooray! for Maureen Freely, say I) won't let me go. Freely has also written an afterword to the novel, which gives some historical context to the events of the story, and talks about her process of translating Turkish.
 *Rüya is the name of Pamuk's daughter, in addition to this character's name; when Sylvia was looking over my shoulder this morning she said "Rüya, like in 'off the floor'!" "Off the floor" is a game Pamuk and his daughter play in the essay "When Rüya is Sad", and which Sylvia has appropriated for her own.
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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