Even now, I persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
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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.
It was a lot of fun, and enlightening, listening to Orhan Pamuk reading from Museum of Innocence last night at the 92nd Street Y -- he seemed a little nervous at the opening of the reading but was soon in his element. The big news of the evening came after the reading, when he and George Andreou (his editor at Knopf) had a short conversation about his books and about writing; he indicated, with reference to the lecture series he just got done with delivering at Harvard, that he was planning to publish the lectures as a short book on the art of the novel.
With respect to the art of the novel, one of the points he made -- this was in response to a question about his judgement of the upper-class Istanbullus' consumerist "Westernization" which Kemal is reacting against -- was that "Ethics in novels is a dead end.... Novels do not operate properly if we are strongly interested in passing ethical judgement," which seems to tie in nicely with my idea that this novel works much better as a character study than as an indictment of Kemal. (Along these lines he had noted while reading from chapter 43, that he had responded to a journalist's query about Kemal's "obsessive" behavior by noting that he had never used that term in the book, because "Writing a novel is going inside a person and rejecting labels, is making everyone seem normal," only to be looking through the book later and spot the line, "After that night we had both become resolved to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession.")
All of the passages he read were from the first half of the book, and were only the past-tense storytelling with the present-tense curating edited out. He mentioned this during the interview portion of the program, without (it seemed to me) really justifying it -- he said something like he did not want to confuse the audience with that -- whatever... He also made no mention, nor did Andreou, of the museum he is building in Istanbul. This all seemed strange to me. He closed the reading with a passage from chapter 56 about "the first Islamic porn films," in which "the 'love scenes'... mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants."
When he was reading from chapter 44, in which Kemal roams the back streets of Istanbul searching for Füsun, while "it never crossed my mind that I would remember these hours as happy ones," Pamuk made reference to a Turkish literary tradition of the "East-West novel", which plays out between traditional Islamic culture and modernized, cosmopolitan culture -- I was glad to hear him talking about this since it's been in my mind a lot as I read this book -- however it was also a useful counterweight to hear him saying, as he did several times over the course of the evening, that Museum of Innocence is primarily "a book about how it feels to be in love," though not a romantic novel.
Buscaba inútilmente la forma de soportar el dolor, daba vueltas por la casa, me daba un baño muy caliente, me acostaba, me volvÃa a levantar, daba un paseo, me dejaba caer sobre el sofá, de nuevo fatigada...
Soledad Puértolas, "Masajes"
I'm not at all sure how to translate much of this story -- it is only the second thing I have read in Spanish without a translation available to help me flesh out what the meanings of the words and constructions were. I'm understanding it only in a pretty rough, impressionistic way, the images are quite out of focus. This makes the impact of the words as words stronger in a way, the sound of the language a larger proportion of the experience: and I'm really struck by the shift in tense here between me acostaba and me volvía a levantar -- "I was walking around the house, drawing myself a very hot bath, was putting myself to bed, I got up again, I was going for a walk, letting myself fall on the sofa, suddenly fatigued..."
Many of the constructions in this story seem strange to me and hard to make sense of -- this is contributing certainly to the fuzziness of my reading experience.
It's just really hard for me to match up subjects and objects and tenses in this sentence -- I get that she's saying she was troubled by the phone call (which was mentioned in the last paragraph and is definitely the subject of Me inquietó) -- "It disturbed me and had just, most of all, been bothering me, because (?) it made me be hanging from the hour and from the silence of the room and to imagine, before hearing it, the noise of the ringer making its way towards me." (Or something like that.) El ruido del timbre abriéndose camino hacia mí is a particularly nice image, provided I am reading it correctly.
I'm sort of happy to find an author that I like but am not heavily invested in to practice this kind of language comprehension on... I am also thinking Goytisolo will fit the bill in this way.
"Her friendliness, her interest in me, bore a note of artificiality, falsehood, as if someone had convinced her she needed to act like that. Or simply like when somebody is hostile and antisocial from the cradle, or somebody has a particular ability for languages or for electrical work." -- None of the entities separated here by or's seem to me like they can sustain that kind of relationship with one another.
↻...done
On the approximate spur of the moment, Sylvia and I went to Brooklyn today, to have lunch on the boardwalk with some relatives and to walk around. I don't think I've been in Coney Island since the last time I took Sylvia there, 5 years ago; and have not been there off-season in probably 10 years or more. What a lovely place to be! The sun was confused, shining as bright and as warm as if it were June rather than November. The amusement park is closed; but the aquarium is open -- we saw walruses, and seals, and sharks, and seductive, luminous jellyfish. Hot rock band playing on the boardwalk outside Ruby's. We walked a whole lot, probably 4 or 5 miles all told, and ate tasty snacks to keep us refreshed, and played in the sand among the wheeling gulls. It was a satisfactory day.
posted evening of November 8th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
I found my iPod today! Have not seen it for months, and wondered occasionally on its whereabouts... Today it was sitting in plain sight on my desk. To celebrate, I shuffle:
Pit of Souls, Robyn Hitchcock. Fantastic -- I don't really associate this style of music with Robyn but it is very nice for a change. Shades of Interstellar Overdrive!
Djangology, the Hot Five. From Pet's picks. I can spend too much time on Hot Five listening for Grappelli's work and may miss some of the guitar. The violin solo about a minute ½ in is amazing though.
Blue Moments, the Fletcher Henderson band.
I'm Only You, Robyn Hitchcock. For you... (I like his play with pronouns, it reminds me of FaceBook a bit.) Live 2003 at the Great American Music Hall.
Some amazing work from two Uruguayan artists, Federico Ãlvarez and Mauro Rondán. According to paledave (to whom thanks for the link!), they did this on a budget of only $300. Soundrack is by Snake.
Nice line from SciFiLatino -- "It is refreshing to see [Montevideo]â??s landmarks attacked by aliens, since I thought aliens only knew about the U.S. and Japan. "
posted evening of November 7th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world.
(a) The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now[*]. At Füsun's house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them.
Kemal's desire to paint his life as an allegorical failure, to excuse his behavior as part of a symbolic quest, is becoming more and more a forefront element of the novel. Chapters 67 through 72 are where we finally see him enunciating it. Here Kemal and Faridun are filming Broken Dreams, Füsun and Faridun are splitting up, Kemal is teaching Füsun to drive...
Also nice, from chapter 68 -- Chico Marx makes a guest appearance:
Some stains on a few of the straighter butts come from the cherry ice cream Füsun ate on summer evenings. Kamil Efendi, the ice cream vendor, would trundle his three-wheeled pushcart through the cobble-stone streets of Tophane and Çukucurma on summer evenings, shouting "Eye-es Gream!" and ringing his bell; in the winters he would sell helva from the same cart.
* (Though contrast that with a few pages back, "Sometimes I would forget Time altogether, and nestle into 'now' as if it were a soft bed," where he also is trying to conjure this "spiritual state.")
posted evening of November 7th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is Halit Refiğ.
The book is written in 1901, censored and not published until 1923, then filmed (in reality) in 1965 and (fictionally) in 1981. (Filming began on May 17, the day before my 11th birthday!)
posted evening of November 6th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
The proper way to read Pamuk's novels is to identify fully with the characters. It is easy to get off the right track and see this book as being a moral indictment of Kemal but better to sink into the warm bath of hypocrisy and self-deception which is his mind.
In chapter 67 Feridun is suddenly coming into himself as a character rather than a prop, and is making a movie based (unspokenly, partly) on Füsun's affair with Kemal and with reference to a novel by Halit Ziya -- I believe the novel in question is Kırık Hayatlar -- and the complexity and cross-purposes of the various layers of self-deceit both are practicing here are pretty stunning.
...An allegorical reading of Kemal's story, in which he is striving to throw off his cosmopolitan self and return to true Turkishness, might be part of the story he is telling about himself -- a way to distance himself from responsibility for his actions and obsessions.
Here's something very strange -- it looks like Kırık Hayatlar was made into a film about 15 years before Kemal and Feridun started working together. It seems a little weird that Kemal is not mentioning this, it's not the kind of detail I would expect him to elide.
John was over tonight (after the reading) and we jammed out for a couple of hours. This is the approximate set list with some comments. (Hoping to keep set lists every time we play -- that seems like a good way of keeping track of the music.)
Prodigal Son -- this was good, maybe my favorite song of the evening. I used to play a pretty good version of this on guitar, I'm finding it's a very different song on violin -- here is a tape of me playing it, except with no guitar or vocals: Prodigal Son (the ending needs work, both in the solo and duet versions)
California Stars by Woody Guthrie and Wilco -- a really fun song to play. I'm trying to work out the structure of the song a little better. Playing the solos can be very much effortless, like laying one's head on a bed of California stars. But I have to maintain a balance, not sink too much into the bed.
Lay Me Down a Pallette on Your Floor -- another song that is very different on fiddle. Lovely old tune about adultery.
Beautiful World by ? -- don't quite get this song.
Angel From Montgomery by John Prine. I like playing this song a lot, not sure if I enjoy singing it.
Amazing Grace, but faster and without the lack of synchronization caused by recording in multiple tracks -- which should be easily solved by having two people play it instead of one in two takes.
Ellen and I got our tickets today to see Ray Davies! He'll be playing at the end of the month in Montclair. Well I'm excited: The Kinks are a band I've always liked when I listen to their music, although I'm not very familiar with the span of their œuvre, I know a lot of their songs and love when they come on the radio -- as Ellen was saying earlier, the trouble with The Kinks is all their songs are just so catchy, you can't stop singing them when you hear one.
I don't really know anything about Davies as a solo act, I understand he plays a lot of the old Kinks tracks and some new music as well. Everything I've been reading online over the past few years suggests it's going to be a great show.
And what great timing! Holly of The Song In My Head Today has picked November as the month of The Kinks; every day she is posting reflections on a song of theirs, one song per album, in chronological order. So far:
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is 
