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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.
What a way to be introduced to a character! From Juan Goytisolo's La guardia:
Recuerdo muy bien la primera vez que lo vi. Estaba sentado en medio del patio, el torso desnudo y las palmas apoyadad en el suelo y reÃa silenciosamente. Al principio, creà que bostezaba o sufrÃa un tic o del mal de San Vito pero, al llevarme la mano a la frente y remusgar la vista, descubrà que tenÃa los ojos cerrados y reÃa con embeleso. ...
El muchacho se habÃa sentado encima de un hormiguero: las hormigas le subÃan por el pecho; las costillas, los brazos, la espalda; algunas se aventuraban entre las vedijas del pelo, paseaban por su cara, se metÃan en sus orejas. Su cuerpo bullÃa de puntos negros y permanecÃa silencioso, con los párpados bajos.
I remember well the first time I saw him. He was sitting in the middle of the courtyard, his torso naked and his palms resting on the ground, laughing silently. At first, I thought he was yawning or he suffered from a tic or from St. Vitus' Dance; when I raised my hand to my forehead and cleared my view, I found he had his eyes closed and was laughing, in a trance. ...
The kid had sat himself down on top of an anthill: ants were crawling across his chest; his ribs, his arms, his back, some were venturing among his tangled hair, passing over his face, entering into his ears. His body swarmed with dots of black and he remained silent, his eyelids down.
Wow. This is a real trip to visualize -- I've been looking forward to reading this story of Goytisolo's, which is the last one in the book of Spanish-language stories I've ben reading for the past few weeks, especially since Badger recommended him to me as a major influence on Pamuk... I'm not understanding this story well enough yet to talk about it in the context of literary influence or parallels... but man! What a stunning image.
Update: added a little context from the first paragraph.
When they did shut up and dance, they were gorgeous -- and maybe the very best bit of the show was the interplay between the director's need to be in charge and the movement of the dance -- there were complex bits where she would criticize another player while they were dancing, stop, rewind, take 2... They could have pruned the dialog quite a bit and still gotten their storyline across, and there would have been room for a lot more dancing.
I've noticed that these people [European colonists] speak with the greatest frivolity, without taking into account that to speak is also to be.
This line (from Walimai by Isabel Allende) is resonating, sticking in my mind as something deserving of further consideration. Not sure yet what to make of it...
posted evening of October 4th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
* and apparently Penguin also published bilingual collections of Spanish stories in 1966 and 1972 -- I'm surprised at how much of this I am finding!
** This is wrong -- the novel Bordeaux has been translated; and at least Google Books thinks that one of her stories appears in the collection After Henry James, though I haven't been able to find any reference to this collection elsewhere.
Thanks to Mark for sending me this photo of Gazprom's headquarters in St. Petersburg -- this architectural monstrosity will be in my mind next time I pick up Inherent Vice:
(spoiler alert -- there is an argument to be made that this post contains information about Alfred Hitchcock'sRear Window that would make watching the movie less enjoyable for someone who has not already seen it...)
The scene at the end of Rear Window where Stewart is fighting off Burr is really compelling for all the overall silliness of the movie -- there are things about the movie that just don't make sense. The impression you get is that Stewart is imagining things and is convincing people (women) to enter his hallucination just out of strength of character. So all movie long you have been sort of lulled into thinking it's a joke, then all that collapses in a few minutes, and you the viewer are pulled too into Stewart's hallucination. (Specifically your disbelief unravels in the scene where Kelly breaks into Burr's apartment. By the end of that scene you have forgotten any suspicion that somebody's joking around with you.) That really pulls me in to the fright and (literal) suspense in the characters' experience of the movie -- and then bang, the frame is colorful and bright again, it's back to a light comedy. The ending is probable the brightest, lightest scene in the film, and the relief/joy of being lifted back out of that paranoid moment of struggle is what the film leaves you with.
Now I am watching a TCM documentary about The Thriller. Amusing stuff -- one line was that Grace Kelly is "more evidence that still waters run... weird..." If I want to stay up late, the midnight film is going to be Shadow of a Doubt!
More animation from Alexeïeff and Parker! I found a compilation of all their pinboard cartoons. The listing:
0:00 Night on bald mountain (1933) -- Just extraordinary. 7 years ahead of Walt Disney. Look at the metamorphosis about 1:40 in...
8:22 Parade des Sools (1936) -- Hats! and lots of 'em. (IMDB oddly has this piece listed as "Parade des Chapeaux" -- this accurately describes the piece but it is not the title.) Possibly Chapeaux Sools is a hat company, and this an advertisement for them?
9:38 Etoiles Nouvelles (1937) -- commercial for Davros Nouvelle Egyptian size cigarettes
At A Journey Round My Skull (which looks in general to be a fantastic source for trippy imagery -- thanks for linking to it, badger!), Will posts several illustrations from Russian Fairy Tales (1945), drawn by Alexandre Alexeïeff; also, a link to the pinscreen animation work of Alexeïeff and his wife and partner Claire Parker. The Nose, adapted from Gogol:
My grandfather had a big collection of books of comic strips -- Pogo, Katzenjammer Kids, Li'l Abner, Gasoline Alley -- that I would read whenever I went over to his house. One of them was a collection of Fox Fontaine's Toonerville Trolley -- Sylvia has gotten into the video game Toontown lately, so I suggested we take a look at Toonerville -- thinking its name had the same source*. I never knew it had been made into a cartoon! Here are the three episodes -- Nicely done!
(Another find from the same search: The Electric Prunes performing Toonerville Trolley on the Mike Douglas Show in 1967 -- not The Prunes' finest moment, which if you're interested in seeing their finest moment take a look at this footage.)
* Looks like I was wrong about this. Image searching for "Toonerville Trolley" brings up some pictures of an actual trolley in Louisville in the early 20th Century, when Fontaine was working as a reporter in Louisville...
posted evening of September 28th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
I've gotten interested in this particular 16-bar melody line that I've been hearing in a lot of old blues and jazz tunes -- it is the melody that always makes me think "They're Red Hot!" when I hear it, because Robert Johnson's song is the first one I ever heard with this structure:
I was listening to Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra playing "How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" last week and realized it's essentially the same melody -- since then I've worked out that several other songs on the records that I'm listening to regularly are built from the same elements -- here is a brief playlist of a couple others, including Tommie Bradley's hilarious "Adam and Eve" and a version by "Bogus" Ben Covington.
(And, wow! A 2000th post ought not go unnoticed.)
posted morning of September 28th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Mix tapes
LanguageHat links to Roger Ebert's reflctions on the books that furnish his life, books that "pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor," like "little shrines to my past hours."
Herta Müller has been awarded this year's Nobel prize for literature, for work depicting "the landscape of the dispossessed" in her native Romania. Look forward to reading her work!
Chad Post has links to reviews of her books, the ones that are available in English.
Rear Window that would make watching the movie less enjoyable for someone who has not already seen it...)
Herta Müller 