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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.
Neat -- the day off! I will get my hair cut and stop by the Radio Shack for some cables. If all goes according to plan, my recording setup will be complete this afternoon, maybe I will try laying down a track.
Listening now to Unfunkked 3 and I gotta say, the instrumental part in Sugar Pie DeSanto's "Soulful Dress" is absolutely genius. Now watch out there, boys.
...Also: Maxayn's version of "Can't Always Get What You Want" is beautiful. Ellen says of the tape in general, "Listening to it just makes you feel better!"
posted afternoon of January 20th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Mix tapes
Jerry raises in comments the legitimate point that "Polk-Salad Annie" by Tony Joe White is a fantastic song. Here is a video of White singing it in 1969.
posted evening of January 19th, 2008: 1 response ➳ More posts about Music
...I knew that at any moment the book would be snatched from my hand, yet I wanted to think not of that but of what was written on its pages. It was as if the thoughts, the sentences, the equations within the book contained the whole of my past life which I dreaded to lose... I desperately wanted to engrave the entire volume on my memory so that when they did come, I would not think of them and what they would make me suffer, but would remember the colors of my past as if recalling the cherished worlds of a book I had memorized with pleasure.
Cool: the inner story of The White Castle begins, like the outer story and like The New Life, with the narrator frantically reading a book, seeking to alter his consciousness through reading. Also I like seeing "the colors of my past", that brings to mind much of Pamuk's other work.
This is the fourth novel of his I am reading, and the fourth markedly different narrative style. Which is cool, I guess, his voice rings clear in each of them. It is surprising, not what I expect -- reminds me a bit of Pynchon I guess, but I think offhand that the differences in style among Pamuk's books are greater than among Pynchon's.
This afternoon is the first meeting of the chamber music workshop for the spring. In the fall, we played Corelli's Concerto Grosso Opus 6 #7 -- and I've gotta say, I don't think too much of it as a piece of music. It is in 6 movements; and none of the movements individually nor the group of them considered together feels like a song to me. There are interesting bits and pieces but it seems like they could be rearranged in a different order or portions cut out, without materially affecting the experience of the piece. I find this to be true both of playing the concerto and of listening to it on tape.
This term we are playing Holst's Brook Green Suite and at least from listening to the tape, I think it is going to be a lot more fun -- its three movements taken together really form an organic whole that I can identify with. The pause between the second and third movements holds as much suspense as the pause in the opening of "The Yip Song". I'm looking forward to playing it.
I am playing viola this time! I'm very excited about that. I've been practicing the viola part to the first movement and it seems like it will be within my ability, though the reading is going to be a bit of a stretch. I'm having a hard time hearing the viola part on the tape -- I guess my ears are more used to listening to the melody.
(What I mean, I guess, is that the Holst is definitely something I would recommend to a friend for listening; the Corelli, not. But Mike tells me other songs by Corelli are very good, so I should reserve judgement on the composer.)
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
I still have not gotten to the beginning of the inner story of The White Castle and already the layering of fictions is seeming intensely complicated. The book is dedicated to "Nilgun Darvinoglu: a loving sister (1961 - 1980)" -- I read this when I first opened the book and thought, Pamuk's sister lived such a short life! Then I started reading the preface (in which the outer story is begun), and leafed to the end of the preface to see it was signed "Faruk Darvinoglu". Hmm, think I, he attributes the preface to his brother-in-law. Perhaps that is meant as further tribute to the lamented sister.
But then I read, at the end of the last paragraph of the preface,
Readers seeing the dedication at the beinning may ask if it has a personal significance. I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. It is because I too have succumbed to this disease that I publish this tale.
That totally knocked me for a loop. Does Pamuk have a sister who lived for the stated dates, who he is dedicating the book to? And if so, is that her name? Or is the dedication completely part of the fiction, the outer story -- or indeed part of the inner story that has taken over the life of the narrator, extruding itself into the outer story?
At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.
Like The New Life, The White Castle opens with its narrator finding a book to which he reacts strongly, and reading it over and over. It looks like this book is going to move in a very different direction than that one did; but it seems worthwhile just to note this commonality. Running through Pamuk's work you see a mystical importance attached to books and to stories.
posted evening of January 17th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
This is the epigraph in front of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle:
To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?
This seems really intriguing to me: Pamuk is quoting a mistranslation into Turkish of a French text (and presumably a real, historical mistranslation), which has subsequently been (who knows, possibly mis-?)translated into English! (This book is translated by Victoria Holbrook, a new name to me -- it will be interesting to see how her rendering of Pamuk's work compares with that of Maureen Freely and of Erdağ Göknar.)
I'm not familiar with Proust and have no way of knowing what the correct translation of the quoted bit is -- not really something I can look up via Google. I wonder...
