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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.
Congratulations are due to Ellen's class at 1199, which participated in the "Selected Shorts: All Write!" program at Symphony Space today. The way the program was set up, students from all over the city and urban area submitted poems and short stories; the ones that were selected for inclusion were read onstage by professional actors. Afterwards the students all went up onstage to introduce themselves. From Ellen's class, Jeanne Dieng's poem "White" was selected as was the collaborative poem "I Remember, an Homage to Joe Brainard":
I remember having the same outfit as my sister every holiday.
I remember dying my hair light brown and it turned out green.
I remember a 600 pound lady that lived in my building who always paid me to run to the store for her. (I went at least five times a day.)
I remember when my great-aunt drank lemon squash and said, "Ah, that hit the spot!"
I remember that I only had one uniform to go to school. Every Wednesday evening I had to wash it and iron it to wear to school the next day.
I remember when we got our first TV. All the neighborhood kids came over to watch cartoons. It was black and white.
I remember tying my shoe laces for the first time. The bunny ears were my favorite and the easiest to do.
I remember when I got the keys to my first apartment, smelling the fresh wood and pine.
I remember when I was five, walking with my sister to Martin's Park in East Orange (it is called Paul Robeson Stadium now) to ride the merry-go-round.
I remember back home in Haiti at my school every Monday they had inspection. They looked at our nails, shoes, our uniform with a red skirt and white blouse. The blouse had to be clean. It was embarrassing for some.
I remember the cool breeze of August brushing your bare skin.
I remember my first time in America. I came with the expectation of picking money off the ground.
posted evening of May 7th, 2009: 1 response ➳ More posts about Ellen
the flower of my dream
is red and gold and ocher
evaporating
Last night I was at work, trying to craft the perfect search for news articles containing images of flower petals; that is to say, the search which would return every valid hit and no false positives. This was quite tricky but did not seem as impossible as it does to my waking eye. The closing image of the dream was a computer screen; columns of text surrounding a picture of a flower, deep red petals radiating outward from a yellow center. The petals were peeling slowly up off the screen and floating into the æther.
posted morning of May 7th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
I was looking at the beginning of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (in Anthony Bonner's translation) this evening and was a bit surprised to find two statments that both appeal to me strongly, and neither of which I have noticed in previous readings. Borges attributes to Menard the opinion that "censuring and praising were sentimental operations which had nothing to do with criticism." (Menard Ârecuerdo declaraba que censurar y alabar son operaciones sentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crÃtica.) This is a fairly commonplace idea and a useful one; I like the way it is stated here a lot (the adjective "sentimental" is just right), and it seems like there is a mnemonic quality to this formulation. And the narrator says that part of what inspired Menard's project was "that philological fragment of Novalis... which outlines the theme of total identification with a specific author." According to Daniel Balderston (in Out of Context: historical reference and the representation of reality in Borges), the fragment referred to is:
I only show that I have understood an author when I can act in his spirit; when, without diminishing his individuality, I can translate him and transform him in many ways.*
Well this is lovely. Something to chew on and over for a while.
*EfraÃn Kristal also quotes this line in his Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, as does Daniel Balderston in Menard and His Contemporaries.
At the dark doorways
they dinned and hammered;
there was clang of swords
and crash of axes.
The smiths of battle
smote the anvils;
sparked and splintered
spears and helmets.
In they hacked them,
out they hurled them;
bears assailing,
boars defending.
Stones and stairways
streamed and darkened;
day came dimly --
the doors were held.
Speaking of forthcoming books by authors who no longer walk among us: Painterofblue sent along a link to an interview with Christopher Tolkien about his father's book The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which is coming off the presses today. I had heard that this book would be coming out; what I did not know is that it's an epic poem. This seems extremely daring to me, and it could possibly be great.* It sort of magnifies my perception of how important world-creation and history-creation was to Tolkien; I would not have thought of it but obviously if you're making up the history of a civilization, you've got to give it epic verse.
Elizabeth Hand reviews the book for the Washington Post, and says, "Perhaps more than any other single work of Tolkien's, this one provides a direct experience of the fierce intellect and imagination that produced 'the author of the century,' as British scholar T.A. Shippey called him."
* Thinking a little more about this: in epic verse, the difficulties I had with LOTR would fall away completely (assuming the verse was well done) -- it's no longer an issue whether I can believe the dialog and the motivations, and I'll be able to pay attention exclusively to the imagery and themes -- I liked LOTR best when I was reading this way.
Ellen has a new article up at South Orange Patch, about the house tour she went to on Saturday. Every spring there is a tour of some notable houses in town -- looks like fun!
Exciting news comes my way today -- I had heard that a new edition of Cosmicomics was being published; today at The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito has more information: the book will include Cosmicomics stories Calvino published throughout his career, more than half of which are not in the previous English edition of Cosmicomics, and 7 of which are appearing for the first time in English. (One of these was published in February at The New Yorker; and two more are in the current Harper's, only accessible to subscribers.) It has been many years since I read these stories, I'm really looking forward to rereading and to the new ones.
The moon is old, Qfwfq agreed, pitted with holes, worn out. Rolling naked through the skies, it erodes and loses its flesh like a bone that's been gnawed. This is not the first time that such a thing has happened. I remember moons that were even older and more battered than this one; I've seen loads of these moons, seen them being born and running across the sky and dying out, one punctured by hail from shooting stars, another exploding from all its craters, and yet another oozing drops of topaz-colored sweat that evaporated immediately, then being covered by greenish clouds and reduced to a dried-up, spongy shell.
The story I posted about below, "Asemblea los martes" by Slavko Zupcic, is just lovely to read aloud and listen, without the stream of language being fully comprehensible at reading-aloud speed. This is like the experiences I was having with recordings of spoken Spanish earlier this year -- or like reading e.g. Faulkner or Pynchon can be, where I slip in and out of understanding language as sentences containing meaning, and hearing language as melodic, rhythmic bits of sound.* So all this is keeping in mind Dave Barber's post from Thursday, "What We Lose in Growing Up" -- the way that post resonates for me is with my constant need to craft a narrative that justifies what I'm doing, that points out how I am productively enabling my development into a better person. I was thinking, the moment of joy in the reading aloud, the unreflective perceiving language as sound, is a moment where this narrative is absent; what I'm doing now is constructing the narrative around that moment, where what I'd really like to be able to do is to communicate the moment of rapture. Not quite sure where to go from that...
Porque sí. Porque ya hemos enviado las tarjetas. Porque las invitaciones quedaron bellísimas. Porque les pusimos los cruasanes míos y las tamaras de Ernesto. Porque las hicimos con cartulina rosada. Porque les dibujamos corazones por todas partes. ...
Sylvia checked out an old back issue of National Geographic Kids from the library because it has an article about Harry Potter; she walked into the room saying "Hobbits look like monkeys!" (not rabbits...) The magazine has an article about Homo Floresiensis, with an artist's rendering of "what real-life hobbits looked like." <grin>...
posted afternoon of May third, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Relaciones, visitas y olanzapina para todas, por favor.
The highlight of this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story is certainly the last story, "Tuesday Meetings" by Slavko Zupcic. It's the story of Benedict's drive-by benediction of a mental institution, as told by the inmates of the institution; specifically by schizophrenic René, who publishes the Haloperidol Eye with minutes of their Tuesday meetings with Ismael, the resident psychiatrist. The story is complex, dense, subtle, and hilariously funny; I'm not going to write about it right now because I'm still a fair ways away from understanding the Spanish text, but hopefully will return to it later on. This story by itself is worth the price of the issue; I'm definitely thinking about seeking out some of Zupcic's other work. I see he has written a book billed as a "children's novel", Giuliana Labolita: el caso de Pepe Toledo -- who knows? that might be right at my reading level. This story does not seem to be available online (no, this is wrong: the story is readable in English only at Zoetrope's site); another story of his, "Réquiem" can be read at piedepágina.com.
posted afternoon of May third, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
The stories in this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story are getting better and more absorbing as I work my way through the magazine -- probably a product of my growing focus and attention. I just finished reading (for the third time, I think I've got it now) Antonio Ungar's "Hypothetically" (online here) -- it reminded me a bit of Waiting for Godot except with only a single tramp. It's a brief (5-page) fable about wanting to change one's circumstances, but in the end just going on. It takes place in three scenes: the narrator's friend Pierre witnesses a brutal argument ending in murder in the house next door; he fantasizes about leaving London and his job and changing his life; then a month later he is with his friends, celebrating a new 2-year contract from his employer, talking about moving in with his girlfriend and applying for British citizenship. In the last sentences he turns to the narrator "como preguntando algo"; his friend can only "inclinar un poco la cabeza y felicitarlo, con la copa arriba, ensayando la mejor de mis sonrisas."
This fable runs the risk of being over-determined -- a similar story has been written often enough that if Ungar dwelled too much on the framework of the fable, it would be boring and trite. But I get the impression he knows this -- most of the story is the first scene, quickly setting up Pierre's life and thoughts and then describing the argument and the crime with a keen realism which contrasts nicely with Pierre's detachment. The second and third scenes are quite brief and work really well this way -- Ungar does not spend time driving his point home, and because he passes it so lightly along, its impact is much greater.
The governÂment of Bhutan is changing metrics: it will no longer grade governÂment programs based on their economic effects, but based on their contribution to national happiness.
Ellen has a new article up at 
previous English edition of Cosmicomics, and 7 of which are appearing for the first time in English. (One of these was published in February at 
with minutes of their Tuesday meetings with Ismael, the resident psychiatrist. The story is complex, dense, subtle, and hilariously funny; I'm not going to write about it right now because I'm still a fair ways away from understanding the Spanish text, but hopefully will return to it later on. This story by itself is worth the price of the issue; I'm definitely thinking about seeking out some of Zupcic's other work. I see he has written a book billed as a "children's novel", Giuliana Labolita: el caso de Pepe Toledo -- who knows? that might be right at my reading level. This story does not seem to be available online (no, this is wrong: the story is readable in English only at 
governÂment of Bhutan is 