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.
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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.
Saramago says (apologies for the roughness of the translation):
I suppose that in the beginning of the beginnings, before we invented speech, which is as we know, the supreme creator of incertitude, no serious doubt tormented us about who we were, about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. The world, obviously, could only be that which our eyes see at each moment, and furthermore, as important complementary information, that which our remaining senses -- hearing, touch, smell, taste -- appreciate. At this initial hour the world was pure appearance and pure superficiality. Material was simply rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, sour or bland, sound or silent, smelly or odorless. All things were that which they appeared to be, for the simple reason that they had no motive for appearing some other way or for being some other thing. ... I imagine that the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of science were manifest on that day, when someone had the intuition that appearance, being the external image that consciousness could capture and use as a map of knowledge, might also be an illusion of the senses. It is more often used in reference to the moral world than to the physical, the popular expression that says: "Appearances can be deceiving." Or illusory, which is more or less the same thing...
This scribe has always been preoccupied with what was behind mere appearances, and now I'm not talking about atoms or subatomic particles, which, as such, are always the appearance of something that is hidden. I speak, yes, of current issues, routine, everyday, for example, the political system we call democracy, one that Churchill called the least bad of all known systems. He did not say the best, he said the least bad. For that which we are seeing, which it seems that we consider more than sufficient, and that, I believe, is an error of perception, whether we recognize it or not, we will be paying every day of our lives. Let us return to the matter.
I found a really well-written, informative review of Stroszek at Pajiba's Twisted Masterpieces. Recommended. Also, in comments thereto, the information that Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis killed himself after watching this film.
posted morning of September 24th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Stroszek
After the event this evening I made my way over to where Mr. Pamuk was sitting and said "Thank you very much for your books." I felt uncomfortable and more than a little star-struck; but he was very gracious and thanked me for saying it. And signed my book! -- Other Colors, that is; he signed it, as I asked him to, on p. 110 at the head of the essay "On Reading: Words or Images", which has made a very strong impression on me. (Unfortunately my plan where he would say, "Oh, you're the fellow who's writing so much about my work in his blog! listen, I was very taken with your reading of..." didn't pan out. Oh well, maybe next time...)
posted evening of September 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
Tonight marks the first anniversary of the September 24th demonstration in Rangoon and the regime's ongoing brutal response. Part of the program was a film of that day's events -- the scene that remains in my head is of a wounded protester lying on the pavement crying, "Don't retreat! Let them wash their feet with our blood!"
Joseph Lelyveld spoke about the difficulty of printing news in Burma and the actions of the censorship board -- with visual aids of a newspaper laid out for printing, with six out of nine stories struck through by the censor's pen. He told us about author Saw Wei, imprisoned this spring for a Valentine's Day poem containing the acrostic statement that "General Than Shwe is crazy with power." (The poem references acrostic poet Walter Arensberg.)
Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro spoke about his meeting with U Win Tin, who at 79 is the oldest political prisoner held by the Burmese regime. Earlier today Win Tin had been released, ostensibly as part of an amnesty of political prisoners by the regime. He is refusing (if I understand correctly) to be considered as part of a larger amnesty and says, "I will keep fighting until the emergence of democracy in this country."
Pamuk and Kiran Desai conducted a readers' theater in which Desai read first-person accounts from victims of Cyclone Nargis, and Pamuk read state-sanctioned reporting of the same events. The articles from the state press were just unbelievable -- total disregard for the truth, totally condescending toward the subjects of the reporting -- one piece was a column about the trees being back in leaf, noting that the trees had not needed any tarpaulins or bottled water or chocolate bars distributed by international relief agencies.
Hey anybody who's around NYC tonight and has no plans or easily changeable ones: this event is going to be well worth your time and the price of the ticket. Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and several other authors will be reading from their work at a PEN benefit for victims of the cyclone and for freedom of expression in Burma. 7 pm at Cooper Union. If you can make it, drop me a line and we can meet up.
Update: Not "from their work", not sure how I got that idea -- readings were from the work of imprisoned Burmese dissidents, as would make more sense given the nature of the event. What an amazing evening!
posted morning of September 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Saramago says (approximately -- I am no Jull Costa; but with a little help from Google I can get something I think close to what he has written):
I believe that every word we pronounce, every movement and gesture,... each one and all of them together, can be understood as pieces of an unintentional autobiography, which although involuntary, or for that very reason, is no less sincere and truthful than the most thorough of stories of life written on paper. ...I propose a day, more earnestly than it might seem at first glance, when every human being would have to let his life story be written down, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, as they began to overflow the Earth, should be transported to the Moon. This would mean that the great, the enormous, the gigantic, the excessive, the vast library of human existence would have to be subdivided, at first into two parts, and then, with the passage of time, into three, into four, eventually into nine, always supposing that the eight remaining planets of the solar system would have environments hospitable enough to respect the fragility of paper. ...Like the greater portion of good ideas, this one too is unrealizable. Have patience.
posted evening of September 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about José Saramago
Matt Yglesias links this really interesting article in the Washington Post: Study Ties Wage Disparities To Outlook on Gender Roles. If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to be saying that traditional-minded sexist men earn substantially more money than "egalitarian" men, for similar work -- egalitarian men in turn earn more than egalitarian women, who earn more than sexist women. It would be interesting to see how the study separated people into "traditional-minded" and "egalitarian" baskets.
With respect to the lowest-earning group, sexist women, the study's author asks, "If you were a traditional-minded woman, would you say, 'I am fine working the same hours as a traditional-minded man in the same industry with the same education but earning substantially less'? I don't think traditional-minded women would say that." This seems wrong to me -- it seems like the difference between "traditional-minded" women and the other groups is probably the easiest to explain in terms of self-image and expectations. (Caveat -- this depends on what is actually meant by "traditional-minded" in the context of the study. I am thinking of it as inoccuous shorthand for "misogynist," which was how the article seemed to be portraying it, but I have no idea how close to accurate that may be.)
You can see more information about the study, including the participants form and a dissertation proposal, at Beth Livingston's site; Ms. Livingston is a co-author of the study.
posted afternoon of September 22nd, 2008: 2 responses
Today is an important day to contact your representatives in Congress. Tell them you are opposed to the bailout proposed by Secretary Paulson; tell them the country cannot afford to buy the banks' worthless assets at wildly inflated prices. We need a better plan, something with oversight and control. You can find some talking points in Paul Krugman's column today. As Brad says, this is a very big deal.
posted morning of September 22nd, 2008: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Politics
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace's suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted.
A.O.Scott writes an eloquent essay on Wallace's legacy in today's N.Y. Times, with reference to Wallace's 2004 review of a Borges biography.
He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn't necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness -- wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake -- could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.
It seems to me like the line "You know that was the last thing on my mind" admits of two not mutually exclusive readings. It could just be a restatement and intensifier of "Didn't mean to be unkind"; or it could also be a separate statement, that he just wasn't thinking about how he was behaving toward the woman he's singing to. The difference here keys on whether that takes "I could have loved you better" or "to be unkind" as its antecedent; I like the ambiguity.
(Yeah, any excuse to post this song... I was listening to Chet Atkins' cover of it last night in the soundtrack to Stroszek and it became the song I want to have in my head all the time. Maybe I will try and learn the words and figure out a violin part for the October jam. Do you know there are like 50 covers of this song -- most of the ones I can find on YouTube are inferior to the original although Dolly Parton's version is pretty easy on the ears. Oh also: here is a tape of Tom Paxton singing "Rambling Boy" on Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest" show.)
posted morning of September 21st, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Songs
Michael Hudson compares the Paulson bailout proposal to the New Yazoo land scandal, the "perfect combination of financial and real estate fraud on a magnitude that helped establish some of Americaâ??s great founding fortunes."
Paul Krugman walks through the reasons for our current economic troubles -- he believes the administration's bailout proposal is a bad idea, and a potentially dangerous one.
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