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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.
Annie Proulx turns 73 today. I find this slightly surprising, somehow I had pictured her as being in her late 50's. (Proulx is two years older than Thomas Pynchon, but she did not start writing novels until 1992.) If you have not read Accordion Crimes and Postcards, well, you ought to read them. (The Shipping News is skippable.) And that's not even to mention her fine, fine short stories!
I found out about Proulx's writing when the movie of Brokeback Mountain came out, and read just about everything I could find by her in the months immediately after that. I love becoming infatuated with an author.
posted morning of August 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Birthdays
I spent a lot of time on this, to be with you So please don't lock away your eyes
My main thought listening to Element of Light last night was, I've listened to these songs often enough that they are part of the fabric of my consciousness; and yet I am still surprised listening to them, by the pure lushness of Robyn's voice.
This is a great album, many fans seem to think it is his best. I don't feel that way, but it is definitely up there among my favorite things. It's also the only record of his that I actually bought as a kid, so I've had it kicking around my space all these years.
This morning I had it in the car stereo driving to work, and by fortuitous coincidence, I got to work and parked precisely at the end of Side A (back in vinyl days); and my drive home in the evening lasted exactly as long as Side B. So I got to listen to the record as it was intended back in 1985, and I think that is kind of important for this record. "The President" just makes more sense as the last song on a side; and "Raymond Chandler Evening" works much better as a new beginning than as the track after "The President".
The bonus tracks (10 of them!) are mostly just fine. I'm especially happy with "Tell Me About Your Drugs", which I've never heard before (actually, I think all of these bonus tracks are new to me!), and "Upside Down Church Blues", which is only a little out of place -- it belongs on "The Basement Tapes" performed by Dylan and The Band. I question the decision to end the tape with alternate cuts of "Bass" and "Lady Waters and the Hooded One", though -- those two songs are real highlights of the record, and the alternate versions are just annoying.
So I've had this song on my mind for a couple of days. I wish I knew its title so that I could find the B part (and get the second half of the A part a little better in mind as well). I believe it is Irish or possibly and American Civil War-era tune. If you have any idea what song I'm thinking of, let me know. It goes a little like this:
Aha! OTJunky at the Fiddle Hangout supplies the name of the tune: it is (a poorly remembered) "Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine." Here are some folks playing it for reals on YouTube:
posted evening of August 21st, 2008: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Picture (from Wikipædia) is the statue of Adamastor in Lisbon -- it is on the bench across from here that our hero Ricardo Reis spends much of his time sitting. How lovely! Man, I could look at that for a long time.
Adamastor is a god from the poem Os Lusíades by Camões, which is Portugal's national epic .
Adamastor also appears in Pessoa's poem "O Mostrengo" ("The Monster"), which is online here with a translation I can't vouch for*, and which inspired an animation you can watch on MeFeedia. "O Mostrengo" was the inspiration for D.S. Maguni's "O Gigante Adamastor", written for the Mozambiquan rebel cause in the 1970's.
Another view of the statue is at Flickr. (Or possibly the Wiki pic is a cropped detail of that graphic -- they certainly look very similar layouts.)
* The translator says, "This page is solely intended to entice the students of Portuguese who may, through it, be tempted to have a go at Mensagem." The page has links to the full text of Mensagem and notes.
Ellen and Sylvia are out of town until Friday -- I spent last night watching movies*, and am spending tonight listening (for the first time!) to the new Robyn Hitchcock box set. Maybe I will write about it later on.
* (Watched three concert tapes with Bob, all were great but one I must particularly recommend -- The Leningrad Cowboys' Total Balalaika Show, absolutely amazing and hilarious and surreal.)
Here are a few of the things that moved me while I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend:
My dear Fernando, choose your words carefully, you put yourself at great risk of being absurd. If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words.
This is really striking -- I can imagine it outside any novel, in big letters on the wall. Certainly a thought to revisit from time to time. (A nice justification for blogging!)
Do you regret having written it. There is nothing more pointless in this world than regret, people who express it merely want to be forgiven, then they fall back into their weakness, for each of us, deep down, continues to take pride in his weakness.
This is almost a commonplace, but I think the bit about pride renders it original.
I am making no declaration of love, But you are. We are exchanging greetings, sprigs of flowers, it is true that they are pretty, I mean the flowers, but they are cut, they will soon wilt, they are unaware of this and we pretend not to notice. My flowers I place in water, and will watch them until the colors fade. Then you will not watch them long. Now I am watching you. I am no flower. You are a man, I am capable of knowing the difference. A tranquil man, who sits on a riverbank watching what the current carries past, perhaps waiting for himself to be swept away.
This works extremely well as poetry, but it kind of highlights my trouble with the book, which is that the characters are not fully realized as people -- they seem like puppets mouthing this dialog. (The bit about sitting on the riverbank reminds me of Snufkin, from Jansson's Moomin series.)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast My Name is Red on its Classic Serial program -- it sounds from Gillian Reynolds' note like it was a fantastic adaptation. I didn't know about it until just now, which is too bad because you can listen to the latest episode online for a week after it airs. Hopefully they will rebroadcast it before too long, I'd love to hear it.
Counter to prediction, I did not finish The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend. I am however moving a bit closer to writing a summing-up post. My thoughts are moving in this kind of a direction: the book is beautiful and full of powerful original thought; but I have two complaints. First is a complaint with myself; I am not equipt to understand this book. Specifically I don't know Pessoa's poetry more than a little bit; I know hardly anything about Portuguese history, classical nor modern (I didn't know until I started reading this book, that "Lusitanian" means "Portuguese", nor until I looked it up just now that that is because Lusitania was the province of the Roman empire which included modern Portugal -- this just by way of example); and I don't know enough about the history of Europe in the years leading up to the second World War. A full understanding of this book seems like it would require pretty close acquaintance with these three fields.
But insofar as I do understand the book: it seems to lack the focus and intensity of Saramago's later fiction. He spends a lot of time on Reis' character but it is still cryptic to me; Reis' self-absorption seems pretty reprehensible but I don't have any window on how he justifies it to himself. And his relationships with Lydia and with Marcenda are not touching me.
So but anyway: Still reading it, still loving it, with caveats. Later on this evening I will post some of the meaningful bits I've been reading and thinking about this weekend.
posted afternoon of August 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
* If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.
I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
(Proulx is two years older than Thomas Pynchon, but she did not start writing novels until 1992.) If you have not read Accordion Crimes and Postcards, well, you ought to read them. (The Shipping News is skippable.) And that's not even to mention her fine, fine short stories!
Picture (from 
Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
