Although I have done it all these thirty years or more, although I live my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, still I think that there are few activities so worthy of inspection as the reading of novels.
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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.
Istanbul was an open book to him now; it harbored no secrets.
Galip's unravelling continues in Chapter 30 -- he accosts a stranger on a bus, asking "What does this snow signify? What does it augur?" -- and the reader is complicit in his insanity. The dream he recounts in this same interaction is breath-taking.
I'm having a little trouble reading this chapter -- I have started it over a couple of times thinking I'm missing the point. Today when I restarted it I was approaching it from an angle of "maybe Pamuk has blown his wad, Galip already became Celâl in the last two chapters, if he's going to spend the next hundred pages talking about the same thing there is a lot of potential for it to get boring." But I started to get excited about the story again as I was reading -- now it's seeming like Galip's eventual metamorphosis may be into the city of Istanbul. (Particularly interesting in this regard is that Freely is translating the names of Istanbul streets in this chapter, which I do not think she has been doing in the rest of the book -- it seems totally appropriate here.)
Permit me to compose drunk for a moment, in honor of Michael's birthday. (Happy Birthday, Michael! Michael has been visiting us for a week, roughly, and is going away to Boston tomorrow. I always thought he was a native of Berlin, but turns out he is a native of southern Missouri who has lived most of his life in Berlin.)
Yoga class tonight was taught by a substitute (a little spacy, I thought -- and I have a nerve, to be thinking of other people as spaced out) -- when we did the corpse pose at the end of class I had the following thoughts:
This is not a great pose for me to meditate in. I feel much less self conscious when standing or sitting.
You know what would be great? I should just levitate now.
OK, let's go, levitating muscles. Start lifting!
Well of course I didn't go anywhere. It made me start thinking, in a strongly non-meditative way, about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book which I just loved as a teenager and have felt embarrassed about ever since. See what I was thinking, roughly, was: If I was JLS I would just know that I could levitate, and it would happen independent of my wishing it to. But of course the point of JLS was that you didn't have to be a particular person to get this supernatural effect, you just had to be completely comfortable in your being.
posted evening of April 15th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Speaking of Other Colors, this blog looks very promising. Orhan Pamuk category and all. Links to video of a conversation between Pamuk and Rushdie.
Speaking of Orhan Pamuk on video, here is a recent appearance at the NYPL. And nobelprize.org offers a half-hour interview with the author. Plus, here is Maureen Freely discussing translating Pamuk's work.
This evening I saw the first James Bond movie I have ever seen: From Russia with Love. How did I like it? Well, I liked it. It seemed extremely similar to North by Northwest, which is a great movie to resemble. Didn't have Hitchcock's genius, maybe, so a lot of the attempts at wit came off as corny and a lot of the dialog was flat; but the photography was lovely, the action exciting, the plot twists not always expected.
Why did I watch the movie? I saw a reference to Goldfinger in Pamuk's Other Colors, and then read this letter in the NY Times, pointing out that Pamuk had the wrong movie in mind. Thought, I've never seen a Bond movie, maybe I'll see about it, added it to my Netflix queue.
posted evening of April 14th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Sylvia and I went for a bike ride this evening -- she is doing really well at it, and I'm looking forward to the warmer weather when we can ride more frequently. Her seat has been set about 1½" - 2" lower than where it should be, so that she can comfortably stand on the ground while she's mounted, to give her more confidence. I had mentioned to her last time we rode, that I could raise it up a bit and she'd have more power in her legs -- as we were heading out tonight she asked me to do it. So I raised it about ¾" -- the difference is really noticeable. She's riding a lot faster, going up (slight) hills more easily, and not getting tired as fast. And she is still confident -- although she looked a little startled the first time she braked. I will raise it to the proper height next time we ride, hopefully within the next few days.
(Just after I posted this, I noticed that the photo at the top of the page shows Sylvia riding on the back of our tandem -- she's on her own bike nowadays. Ought to get some pictures of that in the photo album.)
posted evening of April 14th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.
Okay, corporate propaganda -- the primary source is an employee of Nokia -- but this article about cell phone use in the third world paints a pretty plausible (IMO) picture of how having a persistent point of contact is really useful to people in societies where that is not taken for granted.
Occasionally I will write a post that gets a lot of traffic. It feels good when that happens. A few months ago, my God Will Fuck You Up post got many hits because it was linked from a pagan mailing list. Today, the concert review got a ton of hits because I posted it to the fegmaniax list. More of a rush, because people are coming to read something I wrote rather than to listen to a song I linked by somebody else; and less of a rush, because I advertised myself rather than being recommended by a third party.
Fegmaniax looks like it will be a nice community to join. The key thing here is, I get way more traffic from mailing lists than I ever do from links on other blogs. Possible reasons:
I don't ever get linked from high traffic sites.
people subscribed to mailing lists are predisposed to find the link interesting in a way that people browsing web sites are not.
(I should note: the performance of "If I Fell in Love with You" in the encore last night totally blows away my theory about Robyn Hitchcock being unable to cover the Beatles. Being wrong about that is not at all a bad thing.)
