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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.
I rode my bike down Muntaner to Diagonal. Parked it in front of the Dau al set gallery and rang Valerie's doorbell.
—When you come to the door, so you won't have to tell me who it is, ring three times in a row: ta, ta, ta. That way I'll know it's you. —that's what she had told me, the first day.
The door opened and I went upstairs. Valerie went over to the sofa with me as soon as I came in, she was moving her hands slowly in front of me, telling me her mother had been in the hospital since that afternoon, she feared the worst, that she had only come away from there to meet me, so that I would not come to an empty apartment and be scared.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek, paid me, and we left the apartment. Of course I didn't tell her any of what I'd been thinking about. I wasn't going to be seeing her anymore, surely; but I had left the mobile -- the lizards, the Gaudi mobile, on her sofa.
I have made a couple of revisions and have submitted the story to Words Without Borders. The biographical note I submitted:
Jeremy Osner is a computer programmer living in New Jersey. He came to Spanish translation late in life and has been learning the language as he learns the voices of the authors he has translated. Notable among these is Venezuelan Slavko Zupcic, a psychiatrist now living in Valencia, Spain, whose stories examine the gaps in understanding at the borders between people.
Zoe Leonard's political wishes (found at towleroad.com, and thanks for the link, ragebunny!):
I want a dyke for president. I want a person
with aids for president and I want a fag for
vice president and I want someone with no
health insurance and I want someone who grew
up in a place where the earth is so saturated
with toxic waste that they didn't have a
choice about getting leukemia. I want a
president that had an abortion at sixteen and
I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two
evils and I want a president who lost their
last lover to aids, who still sees that in
their eyes every time they lay down torest,
who held their lover in their arms and knew
they were dying. I want a president with no
airconditioning, a president who has stood on
line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare
office and has been unemployed and layed off and
sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
I want someone who has spent the night in the
tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and
survived rape. I want someone who has been in
love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has
made mistakes and learned from them. I want a
black woman for president. I want someone with
bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has
eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who
crossdresses and has done drugs and been in
therapy. I want someone who has committed
civil disobedience. And I want to know why this
isn't possible. I want to know why we started
learning somewhere down the line that a president
is always a clown: always a john and never
a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker,
always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
(Check out this group reading of the piece, in English and in Danish!)
posted afternoon of January 14th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Politics
Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band is the group that got me listening to old-time music. Not the first old-time I listened to, certainly; but when I heard Maria d'Amato (who would marry the group's banjo player and become one of the great popular music voices of the 60's and 70's as Maria Muldaur) sing "Richland Woman Blues" -- this was in the late 90's sometime, after I had come home from a Christmas visit to my parents with a cassette dub of two records, Jug Band Music and See Reverse Side for Title -- was a signal moment for me, it was when I knew what kind of music I wanted to play, what I wanted to sound like.
It was fun to happen on that Wyos cover of "Rag Mama Rag" last night -- that was one of the first songs I learned to play when I was taking lessons in finger-style guitar from Eric Frandsen. I've added a couple of tracks to the end of my You Ain't Goin Nowhere playlist, ending up with The Band's song "Rag Mama Rag". And re. The Band, exciting news! Ellen and I are going to see Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble at the Wellmont Theater on Friday the 10th.
Update: Midnight Ramble show in Montclair is postponed until April.
If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,
as when a subway car turns on a switch,
the wheels screeching against the rails,
and the lights go out—
but are on again in a moment.
Nice! I tried reading it being conscious of its meter, of where the stresses fall in the cadence, and discovered that I want to insert the word "up" between "screeching" and "against", went over the line with a couple of different stress patterns to see if there's one that works better with the existing wording.
It turns out that in my first reading, I was reading "the wheels screeching" without pause, placing "whee" and "scree" on downbeats/stresses, whereas I think a pause is intended after "wheels" - this gives the rhythm a syncopated quality. If you hold a pause *(cæsura? I am not sure, just, what this term means but I think it might be applicable) here long enough you can elide from "screeching" to "against" and keep to the poem's rhythm. This in effect substitutes the pause, the absence, for the syllable that I was interpolating.
Wondering now if this poem could be expanded into a lyric -- it seems to have a lot of possibilities in it.
Thinking that the insight about pauses standing in for syllables might help me clean up my wordy lines a bit.
He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed," and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never win an argument.
Digging The Corrections, finding Franzen's voice fits my psyche like a glove. I'm finding all of his characters easily inhabitable, Chip's anxiety, Denise's frustration, Gary's irritable paranoia... even the parents are easy to understand, identify with.
