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Wednesday, September second, 2009
By way of the Wooster Collective I see that street artist Elbow-Toe has a new painting in Union Square, based on Rembrandt's drawing "Monk in a Cornfield" -- beautiful, I hope it is still there next time I am in the city! The Rembrandt drawing really captured my imagination when I saw it a few years ago at the Pierrepont-Morgan Library.
posted evening of September second, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, September first, 2009
A whole bunch of images from our vacation are up at the READIN Family Album -- here are a couple of my favorites:  This trip featured a bit of time on the water, which I really enjoyed -- this is me and Sylvia on the ferry to Provincetown on Tuesday.  And here we are swimming in the ocean, at Herring Cove beach on the north tip of Cape Cod; one of the most pleasant beaches I've ever visited.  Another really nice beach is the one at Hull, just a few miles from where we were staying in Scituate.  Ellen got this lovely photo of the sun setting over Hull.
posted evening of September first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, August 29th, 2009
I was able to find a lot of the titles from the soundtrack at YouTube. Not complete, but respectable... Index here.
 ...And I just noticed, these songs are in alpha order rather than in the order they appear in the book. That seems like something that ought to be corrected.
posted evening of August 29th, 2009: Respond
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Amazon is really doing some cool stuff with promoting Inherent Vice -- I'm not sure exactly what the business structure of this is, it looks like it is coming from Amazon rather than from the publisher, it looks like Pynchon is actively involved. Anyway, today I found a playlist of tunes featured in the book: Soundtrack to Inherent Vice. Not sure why they did not put multimedia players on the page, but there are links to mp3 files for a whole lot of the songs. (Alas, not for the fictional ones... Who's going to record "Just the Lasagna"?)
(Something I ought to do: make a YouTube playlist containing the subset of songs on the list that are freely available... Update: here it is!)
posted morning of August 29th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, August 28th, 2009
Hmm... today is seeming like a very comfortable day for not taking a long bike ride as I had been thinking -- instead I think I am going to lie in a hammock and read more Alice Munro stories -- these are really grabbing my imagination! Sort of a similar sound to Annie Proulx (enough so that I'm wondering how much of an influence she had on Proulx), but more self-consciously cultured and introspective, I think. Took a short ride to Norwell this morning -- the countryside around here is beautiful! I saw a flock of birds on the road that I think were wild turkeys -- here in southeastern MA, ground zero for the first Thanksgiving. Will take a short ride to North Scituate later on and get some vegetables at the farm stand there...
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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When we took the ferry out to Provincetown on Tuesday, among other fun things (Provincetown had me thoroughly charmed -- it seems like about the nicest beach town/resort town I can imagine, I am searching my brain for ways to make my future include living there some day...), we found Tim's Used Books -- funky little shop with a really interesting selection. We were in a hurry and on our bikes; under different circumstances I would have spent a few hours there and come away with a heavy bag of books. Other vacationing news... Sylvia and I went to sea yesterday afternoon on a whale-watching ship, we saw many humpback whales and a few minkes. Got some nice photos, I'll post them when we get back home. It was a beautiful day for it. (Weather has been really nice this week, though it looks like a stormy weekend.) I've been taking some moderately long bike rides around the countryside here, to places like Hingham and Hull; this afternoon I will try for Duxbury and Marshfield. Martha is coming over for dinner this evening.
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Another unexpected discovery from Deedee's bookshelf is Alice Munro's Selected Stories -- I haven't really heard or read much about this author before but she's really got my ear after a couple of stories. A really distinctive, fully human narrative voice, that reminds me of a lot of different contemporary authors without being any of them.
posted evening of August 27th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
This is a very clear night and is making me very happy to be here where there is not a lot of light pollution... I haven't gotten a chance to really look at the night sky for years. Also very loud cicada soundtrack to the sky-examining.
posted evening of August 25th, 2009: 2 responses
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Today we rode the ferry from Plymouth to Provincetown; we biked around the tip of the cape, bathed in the beautiful, transparent ocean, looked around Provincetown a bit, and took the boat back to Plymouth. Here are a couple of images that I think could be assembled into a poem:
- The million tiny bubbles which comprise the whiteness of foam in our boat's wake, splashing and ebbing into the undulating surface of the harbor.
- The texture of the water's surface changing as the sun hits it; the sparkling tails of reflected sunlight streaming away from the focus of brightness into the green, gray, black, green darkness. Scintillating blackness blossoming from the choppy waves.
- Swimming off the beach -- moving through fields of colder and warmer water; looking at the mottled sunlight on the pebbles underwater.
 (...and riffing on this, what about a Borgesian-fiction spin on poetry, where the author describes a long imaginary poetic work by quickly examining images from the poem and impulses behind them, inventing an author.)
posted evening of August 25th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, August 24th, 2009
Hardship lives in me. What I suffer is myslf that outraces the water or the wind. But that it only should be mine, cuts deep. It is the half only. And it takes it out of my taste that the choice is theirs. I have the rough of it not because I will it, but because it is all that is left, a remnant from their coatcloth. This is the gall on the meat. Let the hail beat me. It is a kind of joy I feel in such things.
Eric the Red is the first character from American History to appear in Williams' In the American Grain -- its first chapter is pieces of narrative taken (as near as I can tell) from The Saga of Eric the Red and Voyage of Freydis, Helgi and Finnbogi with an internal look at the actors' motivations that is Williams' invention -- it is a little hard to know how to classify this writing but for now I am going with "historical fiction"...
posted evening of August 24th, 2009: Respond
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