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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.
I'm making my way through chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk, which deals with the events around Pamuk's being prosecuted in 2005 for "hostility to Turkishness" and his eventual exile. Man this is confusing stuff -- not McGaha's fault, his writing is pretty terse and straightforward. But there are a lot of conflicting issues competing for my attention as I try to figure out what's going on. Pamuk is hoping to win the Nobel prize for literature (he did not, but won it the following year, at which point I think the prosecution had already happened -- I don't know if he was still living in Turkey at this point); Turkey is hoping to be considered for admission to the EU, and busy revising its laws (including the one under which Pamuk is charged) to abide by international human rights law; Turkish nationalists are opposed to the EU and see the prosecution as an avenue for preventing it. Erdoğan, a moderate Islamist, who was prime minister in 2005, had been prosecuted some years earlier (if I understand correctly) by Turkish nationalists for expressing hostility to secularism; and he could not have been prime minister if it were not for the liberalization going on to further Turkey's chances of acceptance into the EU. I want to make a timeline of events but I don't think I'm up to that point yet.
I totally want to make a hypertext version of this book's bibliography* -- it is chock full of useful articles, a lot of which are available on the web. Loving this line from Pamuk's acceptance speech when he was awarded the Friedenspreis of the German Book Trade:
Even as [the novel] relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people's lives as if they were our own.
Note: it seemed funny at first, for Pamuk's trial to come at the front of the book, which is otherwise arranged chronologically; but as I read it is making some sense to me to have this before the novels rather than after -- it gives a sense of the environment in which Pamuk is writing and coming to write, and a context for his cosmopolitanism and Turkish identity.
*And, update: Dr. McGaha has granted me permission to post the bibliography. I hope to put it up tonight or tomorrow.
Sylvia and I were studying the ChinesePod lesson called "I'm Bored" (wǒ wú liáo) tonight -- her pick; she thinks it will be very useful to be able to say she's bored in another language. She got hooked on the assonance between wú liáo and ululate, another recently acquired word. Cute.
posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
NickS, mix-tape-maker extraordinaire, is now blogging about music -- his first post was up on Saturday. His blog: Before You Listen.
(Hm, and I realize now I have been blogging about mix tapes for a year now and never posted about the ones I got from NickS, back in 2005 IIRC. They really gave me a new approach to thinking about music, viz. thinking about how songs might sound on a tape together.)
posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Mix tapes
Allow me to recommend: Dorothy Gambrell's new collection, Cat and Girl volume II. The only cartoon collection I have seen with an index. If you order quick, you can get your copy inscribed. (Note: I think to do this, you have to order direct from catandgirl.com, not from Topatoco.)
But how is this different from
reading Dorothy's archives, which I can do for free? you might ask. And you would have a point; reading the collection is a similar experience to reading the archives. (Like specifically, episodes 315 through 545.) There seem to be a couple of extra drawings that are not in the archives; turning the pages with your hands is a pleasant experience, for you paper fetishists; as is having Dorothy adorn the book with your own picture and witticism (if you hurry!). And generally it's a nice feeling to think you are supporting a young genius in her "lucky jerk" lifestyle. (Also recommended: contribute to Ms. Gambrell's Donation Derby, and she will draw a cartoon of how she spends the money.)
Funniest thing I've read this morning: Sandwiches Cheap! and its sequel. The villanelle is the most restrictive of all sandwich forms.
Also: here is a new interview with Dorothy, with links to some older ones, in COMIXtalk. I did not know about her extra-Cat and Girl cartooning efforts; she also does Very Small Array and for a while drew The New Adventures of Death. (Looks from the interview, like she considers Donation Derby and Cat and Girl to be two separate things -- I have always somehow considered the former to be a subset of the latter, I guess because they are on the same site and the styles are so closely similar.)
Sylvia is getting bigger and more independent... Yesterday evening she and Kaydi (who spent the night at our house) walked without adult accompaniment to the playground, a distance of about ¾ mile and which involves crossing several minor streets and one moderately busy one. This is (I believe) Sylvia's first time taking such a walk without a grown-up. They wanted to take Pixie along but we will see about that next time. They met some young kids there named Dahlia and Shay, and claimed to be 10-year-olds.
This morning Sylvia discovered my name could be shortened to "Germ", and that I should be from "Germany". Great... Took a walk to town with girls and dog, for to buy bagels.
I've really enjoyed Dr. Holbo's couple of recent posts about Plato's cave allegory, and I was happy to read today that Saramago has a novel about (or "which touches on") the allegory -- it is his The Cave, translated in 2002.
posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Cave
I find it really inspiring to read, in the preface to McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which arrived in today's post, hooray!), that McGaha was able to acquire a working reading knowledge of Turkish in about six months time. (Past the age of 60!) Granted he was living in Istanbul at the time and learning Turkish was his primary activity; still it's enough to make me think I should really work at language learning, that it will not be fruitless if I apply myself.
Sylvia and I just took a ChinesePod lesson about "My Dog" (wǒ de xiǎo gǒu, a phrase Sylvia knew well from class) and learned how to tell Pixie to "come here" (guò lai) and "sit down" (zuò xia).
This was kind of weird: as I was reading chapter 13 of Nixonland (about the buildup to the '68 convention in Chicago), toward the end of the chapter as I was reading about how New York City discontinued the use of police call boxes after one was booby-trapped -- I just got this visceral wave of "Stupid fucking hippies, depriving me of the opportunity to live an idyllic Ozzy-and-Harriet life!"
Ahistorical, yes; and about 30 years out-of-date. I have felt many times in my life, a similar sort of nostalgia-by-proxy for the 60's -- but always with the idea that I would have run in Abbie Hoffman's circles.* This was more about a desire to be square and comfortable. Not sure quite where it came from -- it is certainly not Perlstein's agenda to advance this kind of reactionary thinking.
*I don't mean to say this kind of reactionary thinking is better than the other -- just to distinguish it from what I was thinking today. I believe it draws more on romanticism than the longing-for-the-50's I'm writing about here, for whatever that's worth.
posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Nixonland
I've been very occasionally looking at the Newbie lessons on ChinesePod for the past couple of months, since A White Bear recommended the site. They seem like good lessons and easy to follow. And with Sylvia's Chinese school in recess for the summer, I thought it would be a good chance for us to practice together. So I jumped in today and bought the subscription -- hopefully I will be able to keep up with the lessons. And hopefully, Sylvia will keep being interested in practicing language with me -- we've had some fun with it over the past couple of days.
When I initially checked it out, ChinesePod was not working with Firefox, so I had been using clunky Explorer to load the lessons; but as of right now I can use Firefox, which is way faster and less error-prone.
(Note: for looking up Chinese words, I have found Pristine Lexicon most useful.)
Allow me to recommend: 
Quintus 