Although I have done it all these thirty years or more, although I live my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, still I think that there are few activities so worthy of inspection as the reading of novels.
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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.
Up ahead, to one side of the route, is a gigantic granite hand thrusting up from a slight mound in the desert. Yes, I did say a granite hand and I did say gigantic -- towering twenty or thirty meters high -- a smoth rock statue, this Mano, erected here in 1992 by the Chilean sculptor Mario Irrarrázaval as a way of commemorating the presence of humans on this land, both the Europeans who had arrived in 1492 and those who had made the journey so many millenia before Columbus.
Our answer to the desert, that hand.
For more, see Karl Fabricius' writeup of the Hand of the Desert at Environmental Graffiti, with photography from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
So right now I'm reading Ariel Dorfman's Desert Memories -- a fantastic book, one I recommend highly though I have yet to write anything about it -- it is making me think I should start keeping a bibliography of books dealing with northern Chile. This book will serve as the jumping-off point I think, for one thing because this bibliography would be directed towards an English reading audience and the book is written in English (and Dorfman seems like a marvelously interesting figure, certainly worth seeking out the rest of his work); all of Rivera Letelier's work will be on the list with big stars next to it indicating it ought to be published in translation; what else?
I expect The Motorcycle Diaries includes a lot of time riding through the Atacama and probably belongs on the list.
Juan Ignacio Molina's Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili should be present as background information.
Escritores desde el lÃmite describes itself as a blog dedicated to the literature and history of northern Chile; I have not looked at it any further yet.
What else? If you've done any reading about the north of Chile, fiction or history ot otherwise, please post in comments. Movies too! (imdb gives me an Argentine film from 1959 called Salitre and a Portuguese short from 2005 of the same title, and a brand-new Mexican documentary called El salitre, esbozo de una historia en fuga. And Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia de la luz looks well worth watching.)
Another example of woodshedding a melody with variations. This is "Amazing Grace" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." (I noticed the other night that the two songs are extremely similar to each other -- you can tell the difference between them by the rhythm, but it would be very easy to sing either song to the other one's melody.)
This is the first recording I have made with my new chin rest. It comes off of the lovely old, broken violin which Eric (guitarist for the Lost Souls) bought at a garage sale for a couple bucks and keeps on his mantel. It's got an extremely low profile, just what I've been looking for -- chin rests are generally too bulky for me to find them comfortable. The edge of the rest is inscribed "Becker's chin and shoulder rest" which appears to date it mid-to-late-19th C. Frederick Douglass' violin, pictured to the right, has the same chin rest.
posted afternoon of January 22nd, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
I read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was a freshman in college, and Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery a year or so later. I don't have much of a strong memory of either of them anymore, but I remember getting a general sense from them that a way of attaining enlightenment was through mastery of a technique; and I think this sense had a pretty strong formative influence on me.
It was interesting to read Yamada ShÅji's beautifully written paper on Herrigel, The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery, in which he argues quite convincingly that Herrigel's understanding of the art of archery was mistaken: that Herrigel's archery teacher Awa KenzÅ was wildly eccentric and non-mainstream and that furthermore, Herrigel did not understand Japanese well enough to understand what Awa was telling him. Along the way Yamada lays out a terse, informative history of Japanese archery. (Although his listing of the lineages of the various schools of archery is slightly less readable than the Old Testament listings of Hebrew patriarchs.) Interesting, convincing reflections on the shortcomings of Herrigel's work as a study of Japanese culture and on what role it has played in Western understanding of Japanese culture.
posted evening of January 21st, 2011: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Readings
Exciting news from 3% -- Open Letter Books will be publishing Margaret Carson's translation of Mis dos mundos this summer! This should be great -- I remember loving the excerpt printed in BOMB.
Open Letter will be publishing two more of Chejfec's titles, The Dark and The Planets.
It is プãƒã®è·äººã«ã‚ˆã‚‹ã‚¢ã‚¤ãƒãƒ³ãŒã‘テクニック(ワイシャツ) , for which Google Translate gives "Professional techniques by skilled craftsmen: ironing (shirts)" -- I can only hope this title implies it is part of a series.**
*(While researching the title for this post I found a very intriguing paper by Yamada ShÅji, The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery, which I am thinking I will spend the rest of the evening reading.)
This is the sketched-out notation of a melody I was working on the other night. (The focus is not right, I can't seem to take a picture of the page in focus; not sure why. The unreadable text is "slow walking tempo" and "(let ring)" -- the â…¤-shaped symbol above the staff I think means to stress the marked note; in any case this is my intent where I've marked that symbol.) An interesting aspect of writing this out was trying to justify writing it out, trying to explain to myself why it's not a waste of time, what's useful about it...
Writing the melody out ends up being useful to me as a way to let myself improvise -- my favorite thing to do when I'm practicing is to take a short melody and repeat it with variations. I had been trying recently to improvise the melodies "from scratch" but the problem I run into is not being able to keep them in mind long enough that the structure of the melody repeats among variations.
While I was thinking about this I got a message from Vance Maverick that he had written out a transcription of the recording which I'd posted on YouTube. (The images of my and Vance's output are linked to the YouTube video.) The recording is my eight bars repeated three times with variations, plus a measure of intro and one of outro. Vance's transcription is the full 26 bars. This is fun: he has transcribed what is in many ways a completely different song than what I wrote out -- what is certainly a more readable, more accurate representation than mine of what's on the tape -- but which I would have a hard time using to produce what's on the tape.
There is a metric rule we both followed, which makes the notes on the page different from "what's on the tape" -- we both represented metrical values as eighth-notes throughout the song regardless of whether or not they're swung. And as Vance points out neither of us writes out the double-stops -- I think of these as a form of improvisation on top of the written melody -- or is precise about writing out the occasional flat fingering that slides up.
I'm fascinated and impressed by the notion of being able idly to jot down the melody one is listening to -- I am not at all fluent in musical notation, producing it is for me a very clumsy, mechanical process. I'd love to get better at it.
Further progress in improving the look of our dining room: Ellen found a great deal on reupholstering the chairs, from the McGowen Fabric Outlet in Elizabeth. Very reasonable price and excellent work, though perhaps lacking in customer service relations -- at about 5 this afternoon Ellen answers the ringing phone, listens for a minute, says "Jeremy, we have a situation" -- the chairs are finished and the fabric outlet manager wants them picked up right away so he does not have to hold them overnight. So me and John quit practicing and took a road trip to Elizabeth.
I find the sheer extent of the urban area around here disconcerting. I often don't notice it because I will get on the highway to drive any significant distance; but the city, the neighborhoods, keep going beneath the highway in between the exits. There isn't much of any way to get to Elizabeth by highway -- it is just surface street after surface street, and you never lose the impression of being in the city.
The chairs are probably nearly as old as I am -- they and the table are Ellen's parents' old dining-room set. The old leather upholstery on them was looking really bad; the new fabric is utterly transformative.
The genius of Rivera Letelier's Art of Resurrection does not lie in the writing of the plot or the character development. There are events narrated that in aggregate form a plot, to be sure, and it's not (with sufficient suspension of disbelief) a bad plot, but not (by itself) a masterpiece either. The characters are pretty static (except for the two main characters -- and in their cases "development" consists largely of flashbacks sketching out their life stories, more to give context to the narrated events than as part of the main story) -- indeed one could say that in the narrated moment, the characters are almost wooden.
But somehow this does not work out to be a criticism of the book: it is precisely this almost-wooden quality where the æsthetic greatness of the work can be found. Rivera Letelier's calmly focused lens can zoom in onto his characters frozen in the moment of his story like bugs in amber* and communicate to the reader their rich complexities.
Update: It occurs to me that this quality of woodenness and of masterful exploitation of it, is something the book has in common with Buñuel's Simon of the desert, the movie from which its cover illustration is taken.)
So far this winter, we've had a big snow-storm at the end of December and a much smaller snow-storm this week. The snow is icy on the ground now, a cold white blanket for the yards and parks of South Orange.
At Grasp the Universe, watch time-lapse footage of a research expedition sailing from Capetown to Antarctica in 2008 aboard the Ðкадемик Фёдоров. (Thanks for the link, Matt!)
The genius of Rivera Letelier's Art of Resurrection does not lie in the writing of the plot or the character development. There are events narrated that in aggregate form a plot, to be sure, and it's not (with sufficient suspension of disbelief) a bad plot, but not (by itself) a masterpiece either. The characters are pretty static (except for the two main characters -- and in their cases "development" consists largely of flashbacks sketching out their life stories, more to give context to the narrated events than as part of the main story) -- indeed one could say that in the narrated moment, the characters are almost wooden.
