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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Handy to know: if you write to stderr from a CGI application (note: when I say "CGI application", I don't actually know what that means -- what I mean is, an application invoked by the http server in response to a GET or POST request and which uses environment variables to get information about the request), the output will go into the http server's log file. At least it will if the http server is Apache.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
New York Magazine reprints a hot, filthy poem attributed to W.H. Auden.... A little searching online makes the attribution appear to be correct -- although Auden denied authorship, this page says "a copy of it in Auden's own hand showed up among the papers of Christopher Isherwood. Kenneth Rexroth said 'Wysten told me that he had learned more about writing poetry from writing the Platonic Blow than from anything he had ever written.'"
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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This evening and yesterday evening, I am (amazingly) starting to see progress towards a clean basement -- much of the sawdust is swept or vacuumed up, my bench is clear of tools and I'm reasonably clear on where the tools are located; I found a couple of tools that I've been wondering where they were; I'm just about ready to start work on the repeatedly delayed fence for the front yard. I've built it in my head enough times now, it should be fairly straightforward getting it into physical existence.
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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So Bear Stearns is done for. (I did a fair amount of work for them in my first job.) Good analysis from John Quiggin.... More from Jared Bernstein. Nouriel Roubini asserts that it is not in the Fed's power to be of much help here.
posted morning of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
...this eye was there to ease my passage into this "metaphysical experiment", which I would later decide bore the hallmarks of a dream; it was there, above all, to be my guide.Utter silence. I knew at once that the experiment on which I was about to embark had something to do with that thing my profession had taken away from me and everything to do with that emptiness I felt inside me. A man's nightmares are never so real as when he's starved of sleep! But this was not a nightmare; it was sharper, clearer, almost mathematical in its precision. I know I'm empty inside. This was what I was thinking... the thought lingered. Inside it was an open door; I walked toward it, and like the English girl who followed a rabbit through a gap in the hedge, I soon found myself falling into a new world.
... What I created first was not the eye, first I created Him, the man I wished to be. It was He -- the man I wished to be -- who stepped back to cast His stifling and terrifying gaze upon me.
I am wondering about Celâl. At first The Black Book seemed to be mainly about Galip, with Celâl a minor side character, present (or "not present") for comic effect. But his essays are really starting to resonate.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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That fantastic epigraph I quoted, that Pamuk uses for the head of Chapter 1 of The Black Book, turns out to come from inside the book, from a column of Celâl's (specifically, Chapter 8, "The Three Musketeers"). Oops -- now I feel a little embarrassed about searching for the source of this marvelous line. Pamuk has been playing tricks on me again! I don't think I have seen this from any other author, the way he uses epigraphs and even dedications that are internal to the book. Kind of makes my head spin.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Sylvia's dance teacher invited us to a rehearsal of the show her troupe is working on currently. Wow! I am excited now about going to the performance. Lovely bodies in motion -- though we were so close to the dancers I had a bit of a hard time seeing the whole group of them as a unit -- I was just focusing in on individuals. Listening to the music of the first few dances, I was thinking "These are fantastic Dylan songs! How come I've never heard them? I gotta find out what album they're from." But turns out they are not by Dylan at all, but by Ray LaMontagne.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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My usual practice, when I'm in the gym with my iPod, is to listen to one of the Apostropher's Unfunkked tapes -- they get your blood moving nicely. Today I listened to the pod's shuffle function, which gave me mixed results as far as good workout music. 12 tracks, from getting on the machines to getting back to the locker room.
- Started out with the Hot Five's "Djangology", which turns out to be a fantastic song for running on the elliptical machine, one of the best ever I think. It's just so exuberant and fun. Source was disk 2 of the fantastic mix tape which Gertrude Crumlift Sturdley sent my way.
- Next was "Broke Down Engine", from The Definitive Blind Willie McTell. Not such a great tune for moving (although I think the Dylan version would be). Indeed I was about to make a categorical statement that Blues are no good for workout music, when
- "Candy Man" from Best of Mississippi John Hurt came on. This might not totally invalidate my thesis since it is more rag-time than Blues, but still. A funny performance -- this is recorded live at Oberlin College in 68 or so, Hurt was getting pretty old, and towards the end of the record he is missing a lot of lyrics. But you don't hold it against him -- he's good-natured about it and so is the audience. And his guitar playing is totally solid.
- "Satellite", from Robyn Hitchcock's 11/14/2004 performance at Maxwell's. I've been listening repeatedly to his cover of "Satellite of Love" and initially I thought he was playing that. A little slow, but still fun to move to.
- Between-song talk from the same concert -- a wonderful Happy Thanksgiving from Hitchcock -- he says "I hope this Thanksgiving you can find something to be thankful for -- it just has to be an internal thing," and more.
- More concert banter from Hitchcock -- this from a Jan. 2008 show in London. Cracking me up but not great for working out. Check this out:
Now, the thing about voices in your head, is, the first very important question: Is it your friend. George Bush, the president... of the, united, states... has a direct line to God. But we only have his word for it; God has said nothing at all. When your little pal in there gets chatty, just... don't give him your pin number.
- "For the Sake of Days Gone By", by America's Blue Yodeler, Jimmy Rodgers (though I was thinking at the time, it was by Ernie Tubb). Now this is more like it -- I'm moving fast again.
- A twofer, "Mule Skinner Blues" by Jimmy Rodgers.
- Stage banter again? From Hitchcock's 3/14/97 show at the Knitting Factory.
- Good music again -- I seem to be hitting about .500 -- "Skoodle Oodle Doo" by Big Bill Broonzy. I should make a "good music for working out" playlist which could then be shuffled freely.
- "Sugarfoot Stomp" by the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, which would definitely go on that playlist.
- "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" by Dylan, which would probably not go on; but it was a very nice song for cooling down and walking back to the locker room. I wonder if Dylan was thinking about "The Walrus and the Carpenter" when he wrote this lyric, it fits very well.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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I'm reading this article in the NY Times Week in Review, and scratching my head. I have a sort of vague memory that the night before the war against Iraq started, there was a bombing raid with the objective "to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began." I don't remember that event standing out much though against the general horror I was feeling that my country was being pulled into an illegal war by an illegitimate administration. But thinking about it now: wasn't this raid flatly illegal? To make an attempt on the life of the sovereign of a country we are not at war with? Or perhaps war had already been declared*, prior to the initial attack. Thinking about it further, I guess Hussein would be considered a member of the military by virtue of being something like "commander in chief", so a legitimate target.
 Also in the Times today: endlessly depressing and enraging op-ed pieces by supporters of the war allowing as how there might have been some problems with the execution of the war.
*(I mean, not "declared" and not "war" -- I don't quite understand the language that would be needed to discuss the legality of the whole kit n' kaboodle -- but it seems to me now like the initial raid was no more illegal than the rest of the, for lack of a better word, war.)
posted afternoon of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Last night and this morning, I added another feature to the site, which you might not notice if you don't use my blogroll often; but it's a neat feature so I'm going to tell you about it. The expandable categories in the blogroll will now remember between invocations of the site, whether they are open or not; so if you click on "Blogs | Politics" and then visit Obsidian Wings, next time you come to READIN, the Blogs | Politics links will be open. A little thing but I had been wanting to do it for a few months now. Ideally I would like to have the categories be prefaced by a "+" or "-" character to indicate that there is material beneath them; right now you just have to know that something is there "because it looks like a blogroll", which doesn't seem ideal. I think this is within my Javascript programming abilities, look for it to happen sometime in the next month or two. Also, I improved the formatting of the indentations in the blogroll. I had been doing it with blocks of characters; instead I am now using <span>s with padding-left. This means that long link titles wrap with a hanging indent rather than wrapping to the leftmost column; much prettier.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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