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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.
In the video that A White Bear linked yesterday, Mark Leyner is asked his thoughts about the audience he's writing for; he responds to the effect that he does not think about audience at all -- writing for him is an obsessive activity like chess for Bobby Fischer, with no object other than the text. David Foster Wallace takes exception to this:
Sometimes it's an act of communication. What makes the analogy ok but also makes it break down, is that
part of the Fischer-like obsession Mark's talking about consists in a kind of mental and emotional dance
with a constructed reader that you figure has a life more or less like yours, and whom in a weird way
you're talking to. Again, I'm like totally with you about 50% of it; the thing about it is that the
light and fun and all that stuff is definitely, that's part of what makes art magical for me; but there's
another part. There's the part -- and I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a puritan or a critic -- but there's
this part that makes you feel full. This part that is redemptive and instructive, where when you read something,
it's not just about -- you go "My God, that's me!" you know, "I've lived like that, I've felt like that, I'm
not alone in the world..."
I felt excited listening to Wallace saying this because it matches up with some things I have been thinking about since last year, specifically to describe my experience of reading Pamuk and more broadly as a way of talking about art in general -- I wrote a brief note about this last November.
A White Bear says,
Wallace is grasping to understand the possibilities of art as transformational, connective tissue between all these lonely people. For most 20th-c writers, that possibility is a sentimentality that died out around the time that Romanticism did.
I want to find out more about this idea in a Romantic context. Were Romantic authors making this argument explicitly or is it something critics read into their work -- or is it an argument made by Romantic critics? And which ones? It's an argument I've been grasping around at for a while and it would be really useful to hear it from someone else's mouth.
Update: and I guess obviously, duh, this is a strong sign that I should read Wallace's essays and criticism. Will get right on that.
David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. I am sorry to hear that. Infinite Jest was sort of a late formative experience for me -- I mean I must have been 26 or 27 when I read it, and already pretty well acquainted with reading novels; but it seems like it opened some new windows for me into what writing can do. I have always meant to read more of his work but never gotten to it; now when I do, I will be reading the work of a dead man, work which is part of the history of literature.
Ellen sends along a link to Wallace's commencement speech to the 2005 class at Kenyon.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Sylvia and I went to an FCC event on Long Island this morning -- one of the members organized a fishing trip, we figured it would be worth getting up early and driving out there, to meet up with Ron and Nadia. So we were out of bed at 5 this morning, and drove out to Captree State Park to board the good ship Capt. Eddie B. III.
Lots of other little kids and parents were on board, including Ron and Nadia; we weighed anchor at 8 and motored over to the tip of the island. Sylvia and Nadia were interested in the fishing about half the time, and otherwise in running around the ship. Sylvia caught a baby bluefish and threw it back, I caught a couple of baby bass and a very energetic snapper, all of whom returned to the water. It was a pretty good time.
posted evening of September 13th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Samuel Beckett's Film (1965), featuring Buster Keaton as O, has been uploaded to YouTube by user richardhead. It is too long for a single video but I've created a playlist so you can watch the whole thing sequentially. Beckett called his production "an interesting failure"; Times critic Dilys Powell called it "a load of old bosh." Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly wrote a celebration of Film's 30th anniversary for the Spring 1995 issue of Film West, "Ireland's film quarterly."
Kathy's inaugural post at The Edge of the American West makes me wonder how much of the relevant history Sylvia knows about. I don't believe we've talked about it at any length with her; but she has made references to it. Maybe we should go over it some, she's getting old enough. (The events took place just a few days after we had come home from China.)
Not sure if it's a coincidence or what; but on this day, on this date, I find myself wanting to post some tower imagery. Below the fold for more.
Today, the NY Timesprints some before (1978) and after (2008) pictures of the World Trade Center, shot from various perspectives:
In 1928, M.C. Escher painted a Tower of Babel. It does not have the errors of logic that I have been conditioned to expect seeing in an Escher painting. It is very beautiful:
And hundreds of years before that, Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted his own twin towers:
(Oh and let's not forget number 16 of the major arcana! Thanks Ms. Pamela Colman Smith.)
posted afternoon of September 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about M.C. Escher
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Ellen's article about our bathroom renovation(s) is out, in today's Star-Ledger. With nice pictures of the rooms, and a lovely picture of Ellen and Sylvia.
So some people at my company are using Lucene as part of a document retrieval system they're building -- I have interacted with them some and had formed the impression that it was sort of a database product, vaguely like MySql but with more fully featured searching. But now I'm learning a little more about it and am very impressed -- it makes searching totally independent of data storage. This seems like a fantastic idea, I'm really looking forward to learning more about it.
posted evening of September 10th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Programming
Roberto Bolaño saw himself as a poet rather than a novelist: he said, “the poetry makes me blush less.” Now English speakers will have a chance to read some of his poetry; New Directions is publishing his first collection of poems, The Romantic Dogs, in translation this fall. (I can't tell whether the edition will be bilingual.*) At New Directions' site, you can read his poem The Worm, to get a taste -- I found it enchanting.
(This poem sounds a lot like Ginsberg to my ears -- I hope that is honest reading and not just free-associating off the New Directions imprint. Lines like "built of brick and mortar, between United States and Mexico" and "Twilights that enveloped Lisa's father/ at the beginning of the fifties" bring "Howl" clearly to mind. Oh and "I saw him with my own eyes" is awesome.)
So I'm pretty mystified by this Lightnin' Hopkins lyric. Leaving aside the obsession with women who wear wigs, what's up with the rats? Am I hearing this wrong?
(I am definitely hearing at least some of it wrong -- "ain't her own line", "all over mine", "I went to swing out" are all approximations.)
Update: I found a more authoritative version of the lyrics at the African-American Registry. "Rats" is correct. (The verse starting "I woke up this morning" is not present in the recording I've been listening to, from Hello Central.)
Update: Aha! Just figured it out! Thanks, unknown browser who came to this site by searching for "are wigs made of rat hair?" -- This is obviously what Hopkins meant by "rats": "wigs (putatively) made from rat hair."
Update III: Another idea comes by way of Martha M. -- "rats" are the structures used to support outlandish early-20th-C hairdos. The OED says,
5. Something resembling a rat in shape.
a. U.S. A hair-pad with tapering ends.
1869 Mrs. WhitneyWe Girls v. (1874) 98 She can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats. 1888Century Mag. 769 The crescent shaped pillows on which it [hair] was put up, the startling names of which were 'rats' and 'mice'.
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't longer'n mine
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying wigs all the time
Yes, you know I carried my woman to the hair dresser
And this is what the hair dresser said
I stuck that straightener in, and
Wig fell off her head
I told her no!
Boy, if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
(Wigs and rats 'll get you killed)
Yes, you know I woke up this morning, peoples, poor Sam
'Bout the break of day
You know I even found a rat
On the pillow where she used to lay
You know I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
You know I went to get on the good side of my woman
Said Come and let's go and have some fun
You know I went to make a swing out when a rat fell from her head
Like one from a burning barn
But I just told her, I don't want no woman
if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
she'll keep you buying rats all the time.....
Cut the rats out, rat, caught you buyin' wigs now, play it a long time.
↻...done
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about The Blues
12 E. Park in Newark, where Dutch Schultz was gunned down, may be torn down. Its owner is arguing that it's not the same building as the one where Dutch was killed.
So we were out of bed at 5 this morning, and drove out to 
where 