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.
Mountain Station's practice yesterday was a lot of fun, here are some highlights. Our faces are more visible than in many previous tapes, which may be an asset or a detriment.
In the past few months of not-blogging-much (and not at all, I suppose, about translation), I have been quite busy with reading and re-reading The art of resurrection and extending the excerpt I published in translation. I thought a good thing to write about here would be the manner in which I've been doing the translation.
Essentially I've split the process into four (or 3 1/2) phases, rough draft, revision, close read of the revision, second revision. I have (mostly) finished this process for the first 2/3 of the book and taking a break to look at what I've come up with; I must say, reading my translation feels a whole lot to me like reading the original feels to me -- not sure if that has any bearing at all on how others will perceive the text.
The rough draft process is always done longhand; much of it takes place on the train to and from work. This is where I read the Spanish and write very rough, almost literal translation as fast as I can, with (ideally) very little re-reading. The goal is to come up with something vaguely like a Google Translate translation, where the sentence structure is not quite right and some of the words are untranslated or incorrectly translated, but the overall structure and meaning of the sentence can be divined.
Revision is transferring my rough draft onto the computer, tweaking the language so it reads smoothly and sounds right, and communicates the image in the original. This is a much slower process and involves a lot of looking up words and phrases (at variously, Span¡shD!ct, Google Translate, WordReference.com,... the list goes on...) and consulting with friends and acquaintances, thanks all!
Now it's time for a close read of what you've done so far. Print out a few chapters of what's on the computer, and spend a few days reading it, marking changes in the text or on the computer. When done, go through the document adding in the changes you have marked.
What's great about this process is I never feel like I am or should be dealing with a finished product so I'm free to leave notes and uncertainties in the text. What I have now for chapters 1-16 reads really well, mostly, but there are still notes in it about changes that need to be made. Obvious? Probably, but this feels like the first time I am really believing it.
Was not able to hook up with John this weekend for a Dress Rehearsal Rags session... I tried taping some of my fiddle practice. Pretty pleased with the results.
See what you think -- it is a pretty free-associative groove spinning off from some traditional fiddle tunes.
posted afternoon of March third, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So I'm hereby formalizing what's been going on for the past couple of weeks -- Every time John and I practice this year I want to tape it and upload some highlights to you tube...
This week's session was a lot of fun, although the placement of the tripod and the lighting arrangement could both have been a little, even a lot, better. A rockin jam -- the best part was when John forgot to bring our gig book -- and I'm getting better at editing the tape.
Prodigal Son (take 2)
tuning
Stop Breakin Down
Arms of Love (Robyn Hitchcock)
Harvest Home
My Bonnie jam in D
Little Ditches (Mike Cross)
The Sailor's Hornpipe
tuning
Simple Pleasures (Kimberley Rew)
In later years music historians would speak of the Lonesome Nickel tapes as the birthplace of the Mountain Station sound.
Lonesome Nickel:
Circle be unbroken -- traditional
Green Eyes -- Coldplay
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -- Bob Dylan
conversation
"ten little monkeys" jam
500 Miles -- traditional
God-damn Lonely Love -- Drive-by Truckers
Lonesome Nickel -- Jeremy Osner
Lonesome Nickel 2:
That's Alright, Mama
Clean Break
Lonesome Nickel
posted afternoon of February 10th, 2013: 6 responses
