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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.
...That's why we call it by that name. Today in history:
1152
Nuptials of cousins Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine are celebrated. (Their anniversary is shared by blogger Kevin Drum and his wife, who are not however cousins or nobility.)
1593
An arrest warrant is issued for Christopher Marlowe, on charges of heresy. Marlowe will soon be dead.
1652
Rhode Island declares slavery illegal. It is the first American colony to do so.
1876
Wyatt Earp starts his new job as assistant marshall in Dodge City, KS.
1969
Apollo 10 is launched.
1970
Jeremy Osner is born, in Berkeley, CA. He will go on to create a blog for notes on his reading and his music, and generally worry too much about everything he does.
1992
The 27th Amendment, generally acknowledged to be the least interesting amendment, becomes a part of the U.S. Constitution.
Having some friends over tomorrow, that will be fun. Except it's going to rain, grumble grumble.
...A lovely party it was! and Jupiter smiled on us -- after a brief heavy rain in the afternoon, it didn't rain at all, even cleared up a little. The barbecue was tasty and Redfox's onion jam was the perfect relish.
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
(Žižek is speaking of the choice offered, in The Matrix [and note, I haven't seen that movie], between a blue pill that will make the protagonist wake up to reality and a red pill that will bring him into the fantasy permanently):
But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions; but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill, which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive... not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.
...Also, a really nice digression in the fourth segment, about movie characters grappling with "the autonomous undead object" -- the red shoes, Dr. Strangelove's right hand, the ventriloquist's dummy in Dead of Night. "The lesson is clear: the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object, is to become this object."
...If it pans out. I just bought from an e-bay seller located in Shanghai, a 24-dvd box set of Werner Herzog's movies, for about $1.50/disk. (Plus $1/disk shipping.) Thing is I can't find info about this particular box set at Amazon, which has various other 6- and 8-dvd sets of Herzog. But, well, the photo looks legit. The price is low enough and the product (cross fingers) good enough that I decided to gamble on it.
(It makes the gamble seem like more of a likely one, that the seller has numerous positive feedbacks. FWIW.)
At Edge of the American West, there is a fun thread about anticipating new books by your favorite authors. There was no criterion really specified for how to choose the authors you list; here is what I used: an author all or most of whose back catalog I have read*, and if I read about a new book of whose being published, I would run out to the bookstore and buy a copy.
Most books I've bought in my life have been used; buying just-published books is a pretty new experience. I think this is a complete list of the books that I've bought on the day of their publication: Mason & Dixon, The Keep, Against the Day, Other Colors.
(And come to think of it, I've pre-ordered a couple of books from Amazon or similar, so received them at the time of their publication. So probably should add to the list Monk's Music, and Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk which I await anxiously, and the two volumes so far of Moomin comics.)
*Except Saramago, I've only read two of his books.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Keep
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire.
I just found out about this documentary today from A White Bear. Looks fantastic! You can watch it on YouTube, albeit broken up into 10-minute chunks. Slavoj Žižek is also the subject of the documentary Žižek!, which you can also watch broken up.
(This YouTube user Mariborchan, from Maribor, Slovenia, has uploaded plenty more Žižek videos and other philosophical lectures.)
It occurs to me that I ought to read the rest of the Divine Comedy when I finish the Inferno, then read La Vita Nuova, and then I would probably have enough background to understand and like The New Life. Who knows, maybe I'll do it. I wonder if Dante's other works are available in reputable translations?
Update: Hmm, well seems like given that I like the terza rima, the Dorothy Sayers translation may be the only way to go for Purgatory and Paradise. All the other translations appear to be in prose or blank verse.
...Except Lawrence Binyon, which also has rhyme. Guess I will go to a bookstore and look at some of them side by side.
"Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!" Plutus began in a gutteral, clicking voice. The courteous sage who knew all reassured me:
"Don't let fear harm you; whatever power he has Cannot prevent us climbing down this rock.
It seems to me like that "Pape Satàn, aleppe!" line was the first thing I ever knew from the Inferno. I think Eliot quotes it somewhere, probably in The Waste Land, and that my researching his quote in high school was the first thing that ever brought Dante to my attention. Could be misremembering though.
It baffles and delights me how Dante, a pious Christian, can sprinkle pagan deities and ideologies throughout his afterlife. He basically has to do it, because all his literary reference points are pre-Christian; I like that he does not seem embarrassed about it.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Inferno
Reading the Inferno today and I was having a little trouble with figuring out what it should sound like. So I took the obvious path and started reading aloud. And what a revelation! I think I am going to read this whole book aloud -- the sound is lovely and I'm understanding it better. I think I "get" terza rima now, the way it leads you through the canto; Pinsky's introduction was helpful in this regard, but what really made it concrete was to listen to the reading.
My sense of reading poetry aloud has been heavily influenced by Heany's reading (or "declamation"?) of Beowulf, which I've been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks.
Try reading this aloud:
"My son," said the gentle master, "here are joined The souls of all who die in the wrath of God, From every country, all of them eager to find
Their way across the water -- for the goad Of Divine Justice spurs them so, their fear Is transmuted to desire. Souls who are good
Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear Charon complaining at your presence, consider What that means." Then, the earth of that grim shore
Began to shake: so violently, I shudder And sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up From the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter
My senses -- and so I fell, as though seized by sleep.
-- See how the meter leads you on through the passage. I'm finding it impossible to stop reading in the middle of a canto.
posted evening of May 12th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Beowulf
...If it pans out. I just bought from an e-bay seller located in Shanghai, a 24-dvd box set of Werner Herzog's movies, for about $1.50/disk. (Plus $1/disk shipping.) Thing is I can't find info about this particular box set at Amazon, which has various other 6- and 8-dvd sets of Herzog. But, well, the photo looks legit. The price is low enough and the product (cross fingers) good enough that I decided to gamble on it.
I just found out about 
