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Ellen
The love of my life
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.
John couldn't make it over to Lonesome Nickel studios this weekend; Dress Rehearsal Rags will resume in a couple of weeks.
Seemed like it would be a good idea, this sunny Sunday morning on Meeker St., to mash up a couple of old country tunes together which don't really have that much in common. Here's the Carter Family + Ernest Tubb, for your delectation:
Thanks to Ellen for the wonderful camerawork -- thanks to Pixie for sitting and listening!
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Spring is without question here; and we got a ping-pong table! Here are Ellen and Sylvia volleying.
Sylvia and I put it together yesterday afternoon; but we took a break so John and I could do some jamming. A new setup means I'm not sure yet where to set up the camera; and the upshot is that I'm mostly just out of the frame, a disembodied Stroh fiddle. Shades of February! We ran out of tape at what seems to me like a pretty opportune moment.
Ellen and Sylvia met me at the museum this evening after work. Saw some great paintings together and got some nice photos of each other -- click through to see a couple more.
posted evening of November 11th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
So for about 3 years now I've had the vague notion that I would really like to take a two-week vacation from work, travel to Mexico or some other Latin American country and enroll in an intensive Spanish language program. Unfortunately the artisan who fashioned me and put me here on Earth did not see fit to give me any capability of making plans; so it has remained a vague, unrealized notion. Every quality has its antithesis, every vacuum has its corresponding completeness; and Ellen is a very good planner. So thanks to her persistence it looks like we have a plan, a palpable plan, for the three of us to travel to southern Mexico late next summer and study Spanish as a family, at the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca. I can't wait!
posted evening of October 18th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Language
Ellen's birthday was a couple of weeks ago now; tonight we're getting together with some of our friends for a belated celebration. I made her a birthday mix tape to spin for the occasion:
The WS Walcott Medicine Show -- The Band
Heaven -- Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
Our Swingin' Pad -- Jonathan Richman
Take Me Higher -- Al Green
Up on Cripple Creek -- The Band
The Arms of Love -- r.e.m.
The Ballad of John and Yoko -- The Beatles
Dancing Barefoot -- Mountain Station
I Feel Beautiful -- Robyn Hitchcock
Go on with your bad self -- Eddie Kendricks
Strawberry Fields Forever -- The Beatles
I want to sing that rock and roll -- Gillian Welch
When the Earth Moves Again -- Jefferson Airplane
Big Yellow Taxi -- Joni Mitchell
The Way it Will Be -- Gillian Welch
Ophelia -- The Band
Stop Breakin Down -- Lucinda Williams
Fortune Teller -- Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
Electrolite -- r.e.m.
Pretty as You Feel -- Jefferson Airplane
If I am understanding correctly how to use Spotify, this should be a link to Ellen's birthday playlist (approximately -- I substituted publicly-available tracks for some of the ones on this list).
posted morning of September 24th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Birthdays
This post is inspired partly by a conversation I had with Ellen last night. I asked what she thought of the poem I had posted about writing poetry, and she said she thinks that kind of writing is worth while mostly for working it out of your system in order that you can write more immediate poetry... I'm finding interesting that much of Spring and All, at least the prose sections of it, is just this kind of writing about writing, about what I can write and how I can expect the reader to respond to it.
This is from the opening section of Spring and All (perhaps what Williams needs to work out of his system before he can move on to poetry) --
The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day ! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do ? and what do I care ?
I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him : endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways -- but he doesn't exist ! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.
...
And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed -- To the imagination -- you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force -- the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.
In the imagination, we are henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „ I ” I also mean „ you ”. And so, together, as one, we shall begin.
Well, this seems great. I can picture myself saying this, can identify fully with Williams, as he is quite explicitly inviting me to do. Of course my project is not complete there -- I want to say something of my own, that's why I'm writing...
(A side note: the introduction to this edition (New Directions, 2011), written by C.D. Wright, is just great.)
A rainy day seems about the right time to go over the photos from our China trip last month and whittle them down to a fast-movin' slideshow of a manageable 40. You'll see Qing, our guide in Beijing, with Sylvia and Jeremy in Tiananmen Sq., the Sun and Moon Pagodas in Guilin, the Great Wall on a rainy day, the Forbidden City. All of the photos of sculptures are from the Art Zone in Beijing. The photo of the bird cages hanging in Mulberry trees is outside Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai, and in the courtyard of Michael's House, where we stayed in Beijing, you'll also see a bird cage - these inspired our recent acquisition of Woodstock and Chirpers, green and blue parakeets residing in Sylvia's room. The photos of Sylvia, outside People's Sq. Train Station and inside, are near Sylvia's foundling site in Shanghai. The photos of the little kids and the photo of Sylvia with a camera in her hand, are taken at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. The Buddha was in Suzhou. Sylvia reading a Chinese version of Harry Potter and Jeremy are taken on a boat in the canal city of Qibao. Sylvia on a bamboo raft was taken on the Li River in Guilin. The futuristic city is Pudong, taken from the Bund in Shanghai. The view taken from the little balcony to the street was from the Magnolia B&B, the place we stayed in Shanghai. The exercise equipment in a public area in Beijing was installed at the time of the Olympics - they're all over. (Reminds me a little of the enormous public swimming pool in the tiny town we stayed in Spain, put in during Franco's regime.) The red pandas, erhu playing musician, gorgeous flowering trees are taken in Seven Stars Park, Guilin. The chicken and quail eggs in the bucket are soaked in tea, and sold on the street. And check out the rock formation of Elephant Trunk Hill.
