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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 have been following the discussion at The Edge of the American West about using fiction in history curricula with great interest. So it was on my mind this evening as I read Pamuk's essay "Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature" (from Other Colors).
Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish -- without falling prey to vulgarity or parochialism -- the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation -- in Edward Said, for example -- the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalism. But when someone like Fredric Jameson asserts that "Third World literatures serve as national allegories" he is simply expressing a polite indifference to the wealth and complexity of literatures from the marginalized world. Borges wrote his short stories and essays in the 1930s in Argentina -- a Third World country in the classic sense of the term -- but his place at the very center of literature is undisputed.
The essay follows a pattern I have noticed in Pamuk's literary essays: he lays out a great deal of history in a very small space, leaving it to the reader to fill in the elisions. The history here is that of Llosa's relationship with the Existentialists (specifically Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus) and his break with Marxism. Of all this I know nothing besides a very general notion of Llosa as the Peruvian writer who was a radical youth but became quite conservative in his adulthood. (All I have read by the man is The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and that when I was very young.)
But Pamuk sketches the story so well, he gives me a feeling of familiarity with the actors. He makes me wish very strongly to read Death in the Andes:
This novel takes place in the abandoned and disintegrating small towns of the remote Andes -- in empty valleys, mineral beds, mountain roads, and one field that is anything but deserted -- and follows an investigation into a series of disappearances that may be murders.
...
Though Death in the Andes skirts tired modernist hypotheses about the Third World, it is still not a postmodern novel in the manner of, say, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. ...[I]t would be wrong to dismiss it as a coarse statement about inscrutable cultures, for it is a playful and mostly witty realist text about everyday life in Peru: in short, a trustworthy history.
Which last bit I guess is what made me think about Dr. Rauchway's post linked above and the comments thereto.
One time I left my wallet in the back of a taxi; I was very upset, and hugely relieved when the person who found it called me up and arranged to give it back to me. Imagine if it had been a priceless violin!
So last night I was maintaining code for a program which loaded a helper program for handling data files. Before it executed the helper program it would check the sum of the binary, I think because certain instances of the helper needed special handling; if the sum was not on a list of recognized values, the program would log an error and exit. Unfortunately the helper program was not stable and was being recompiled frequently; every time this happened I needed to edit the list of recognized sums, which was hard-coded into the main program, and recompile the main program. I was embarrassed about such a stupid bit of code being in the program so I was editing, compiling, and distributing the main program without mentioning it to anybody. What a stressful dream that was!
(Sort of ties everything together in a way, that I woke up humming Bessie Smith's "Gimme Pigfoot", which was in Gertrude Sturdley's post this week and which I was working on a fiddle version of last night.)
So last week, Captain Sturdley posted this song that I just loved, "Deep Henderson" by the Savannah Syncopators (aka King Oliver and his Dixie Syncopators) -- this follows on her posting a few weeks ago, another jazz tune that I just loved, Mel Powell's "Blue Skies". And this week, she has some Bessie Smith tunes! Excellent.
[redacted: a bunch of fumbling around about whether I understand jazz or not. Unworthwhile.]
Janis lent me a CD of Jelly Roll Morton's music, which I'm loving. Today after listening to it for a while, I played this on my violin, which I think is supposed to be kind of a take on the music I was listening to:
So what do you think? I was really enjoying playing that piece and I think if I had some kind of accompaniment (and -- of course -- spent more time on polishing the performance and the arrangement) it could be really worthwhile music. But I'm not sure how I would find someone that was interested in playing like that. Or for that matter what the instrumentation should be.
Let me know what you think about the sound.
Update: Two songs that I think I could play and that would go really well with this, are "Gimme Pigfoot" by Bessie Smith and "They're Red Hot" by Robert Johnson. (Thinking about it, these two songs are very similar to one another -- but not exactly the same.)
posted evening of May 6th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Songs
Sylvia and I get in the car, and Robyn Hitchcock is playing "Glass Hotel".
Sylvia: I have that guy's voice stuck in my head. Me: Me too! Sylvia: Because every time we go in your car, he's singing... about his wife and his dead wife and the rocking chair. I don't get that: if she's dead how could she be combing her hair?
...A little later "I Something You" starts playing.
Sylvia: How come he's saying "I haven't got a wife", if he had a wife and a dead wife? Me: Well the songs don't have to be about him, they could be stories he made up. Sylvia (laughing): "I something you", like he forgot what he was going to say!
posted evening of May 5th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
The Youth Orchestra of Essex County ended its spring term today with a concert at Daughters of Israel rest home, in West Orange. This was Sylvia's second semester playing with the orchestra and her fourth concert. It went very well, I thought -- the Overture Strings played "Ashokan Farewell" (which Sylvia and I are going to be performing together at the end of the month, when Gladney is holding a talent event at the Chinese Consulate) and Vivaldi's "Spring", and sounded very pretty. The Junior Symphony played a lovely piece which I thought was called "Slovenian Legend", but I'm not getting any hits for that. Maybe something else. And ECSO played the overture to "The Magic Flute", and sounded like professional musicians.
Sylvia sat by herself (I mean with other kids, separate from me) through the Junior and ECSO performances, and paid attention to the music. I kept an eye on her from the back of the room and felt good that she was into it.
I said yesterday that I wanted to reminisce some about starting the blog. Well: I think I've written most of this before, but here goes.
In 1999 or thereabouts, I decided I wanted to have a website, and that it should consist of a notes about what books I am currently reading. I cajoled my then-employers to give me some space on their server, I bought a domain name from Network Solutions, I wrote a couple of pages. The site went live the same evening Ellen's writing group held a reading of their work at Cornelia Street Café; we announced the site's launch, fun. Over the next couple of years I wrote sporadically for the site; occasionally came up with some really interesting pages. (My notes on reading Faulkner's The Hamlet are one of the most popular pages in all of READIN -- nearly every day brings a couple of Google searches for "The Hamlet by Faulkner", which I guess must not have a lot written about it on the web. It is probably my favorite Faulkner book, largely because the process of writing notes on it went so well.) The technology supporting READIN at this point was Notepad to compose posts and a Visual Basic™ program to compile them into nicely formatted HTML.
In 2002 I started noticing blogs (I think the first one I read was Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, which I found while searching for an online publisher of his comic), and getting interested. I didn't realize for a while that blogging was what I wanted to do -- I was hardly maintaining READIN at all anymore, and I didn't make the connection between my web site and this new technology. (I'm slow that way.) But after about a year of reading blogs I decided to give it a try, and in the space of about a week hacked together an ASP script to render pages. And this journal was born.
And, well, this is one of the main things I do for fun nowadays. It gets more and more interesting as I learn new ways I can use the technology. Hope to keep it going for a long time.
You want to know what is a really nice feeling? Thinking of a recipe while you're at work, for which you have a couple but not all of the ingredients; coming home, taking a walk to the (new! good!) market in town;* finding exactly the ingredients you were thinking about; bringing them home and making dinner and having it come out just like you had planned.
Shrimp and scallops, with saffron cous-cous
(to serve 2)
½ lb. small shrimp
a few scallops
1 head basil
about ½ lb. snow peas
1 can baby corn
1 cup dry cous-cous
4 cloves garlic
a pinch saffron
Prepare all ingredients beforehand as this is a quick dish to cook: wash the peas and basil, drain the corn, chop the garlic. Peel and vein the shrimp.
Heat 1 cup water in a small saucepan, with a bit of butter, about half the garlic, and ½ tsp. salt. Heat about a Tbsp. canola oil in a wok over high flame.
Stir-fry garlic, shrimp and scallops with a pinch of salt until shrimp turns pink, about 2-3 min. As water comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in cous-cous and saffron. (I was going to put a little nutmeg in, but I forgot.) Cover pan. Add snow peas, basil, and corn to wok and stir until everything is hot and wilted, a couple of minutes.
Toss cous-cous with a fork. Serve immediately. Boy, this is tasty.
For dessert we had fruit salad with chocolate and crème fraiche, which is not really worth writing out as a recipe because it's pretty intuitive. I recommend such a dessert highly.
* South Orange has a market! This is something new. It is Eden Gourmet. They have close to everything I want in a market. Prices are high but what can you do -- they are competitive with Whole Foods, the other grocery option around here; their produce looks to be better and cheaper than Whole Foods. Their grocery selection is absolutely better and wider than Whole Foods; on items that both carry I think the prices are roughly similar.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Recipes
Ari Kelman recommends Michael Shaara's Killer Angels as a vivid and impressive account of the Battle of Gettysburg. And following on this post is one by Eric Rauchway, about using literature in teaching history; I'm finding the discussion in comments fascinating.
One time I left my wallet in the back of a taxi; I was very upset, and hugely relieved when the person who found it called me up and arranged to give it back to me. Imagine if it had been a 
Unfortunately the helper program was not stable and was being recompiled frequently; every time this happened I needed to edit the list of recognized sums, which was hard-coded into the main program, and recompile the main program. I was embarrassed about such a stupid bit of code being in the program so I was editing, compiling, and distributing the main program without mentioning it to anybody. What a stressful dream that was!
Mildred Loving 