When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.
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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.
Well: the theme this year has been the Spanish language, the literature of Iberia and of Latin America. I started out the year reading Borges oral and (the beginning of) Cien años de soledad, and translating the Spanish translation of Saramago's blog, and thinking it's kind of funny that my interest in Spanish should have ultimately been piqued by a Portuguese author. Over the year I've gotten much more comfortable with the language and am just finding it a whole lot of fun to be reading and understanding a language which is not English.
Maybe it's connected that I've gotten a whole lot more interested in poetry this year than I ever have been in the past, principally in Spanish-language poetry; at the beginning of the year I was reading Pablo Neruda and GarcÃa Lorca, then I picked up Romantic Dogs, also I spent some time on Ferlinghetti; and just recently I've been spending time with some Spanish and South American poets whom I have not been writing about yet. Not quite sure what it is, but somehow the distance between me and the text imposed by the foreign language seems to make it easier to appreciate the sound of the poetry and to look for the imagery being communicated.
This is also the year Sylvia lost interest in having me read her bedtime stories -- early in the year we read The Subtle Knife and The Hobbit (which led to me reading Lord of the Rings on my own and reliving my juvenile frustration with it); after that she was done with the bedtime story ritual. Growing up!
It's 1976 and the revolution has been defeated
but we've yet to find out.
We are 22, 23 years old.
Mario Santiago and I walk down a black and white street.
At the end of the street, in a neighborhood straight out of a fifties film, sits the house of DarÃo Galicia's parents.
It's the year 1976 and they've trepanned DarÃo Galicia's skull.
...So instead of writing that futile piece this week, I spent my time absorbed in reading The Savage Detectives. Lots to say about it! One thing I was wondering about pretty constantly was, who is the documentarian who is compiling the narratives that make up the middle portion of the book? It can't really be Belano or Lima for various reasons. It would be nice if it were GarcÃa Madero, but that does not seem plausible either. (It is interesting to notice that GarcÃa Madero is almost entirely absent from this middle section -- the only time his name is mentioned is by the Mexican professor who's publishing a book about the Visceral Realists, to say that he does not recognize the name. But who is he talking to?) One way to look at this middle section which does not require the presence of an archivist, is as a collection of short stories -- many of the narratives stand up on their own as short stories, and the linking, interweaving threads shared between them serve to draw the reader through the collection.
For a few months now I have had fixed in mind that I wanted to write a critical essay on Museum of Innocence with reference to Snow, examining (in a nutshell) Kemal's love for Füsun as a displacement of his desire to be authentically Turkish, a reaction to his feelings of alienation. But frankly I think writing this piece would take critical, sociological and psychological chops that I do not have -- every time I have started all I have come up with is a condemnation of Kemal for acting in bad faith -- which is not what I was aiming for. So, I'm going to move on from this, try and find something else to think about...
It is worth noting -- I didn't blog the end of the novel partly out of wanting to avoid spoilers, partly out of wanting to save material for the essay I was going to write -- that the last 50 pages of the book were just fantastically good reading. All through the book I felt conflicted about not liking Kemal, wondered if it was even worth reading with such a jerk for a narrator; but the end of the book took away any doubts I had been feeling about whether this is a great novel.
We spent a fun, warm week in Florida with Sybil and Barry and Harry, riding bikes and walking on the beach and watching birds. Hope your week was good and your Christmas day (if you observe the day) cheerful -- happy Day before Boxing Day!
Off for the winter break -- I'll be visiting the Painter of Blue in a far warmer clime than my own, for a week. So no blog activity for a few days -- I'm trying to stay off the computer while down there and work on writing a piece about Museum of Innocence and Snow. I haven't been particularly active on weekdays anyway for a while, so there won't be that much difference; but this gives me an opportunity to share a soup recipe that I cooked for Ellen and myself tonight.
We've been in a pattern lately of cooking a large pot of soup on the weekends and then keeping it in the fridge for a couple of days and warming up leftovers for lunches and dinners... Clearly that is no good today, when we're going away. So here is a soup that serves two people without being too little or too much -- I'm pretty happy about having reckoned the quantities accurately. It is a lovely cold-weather soup, and vegetarian if you do not use chicken stock; adapted pretty freely from a larger recipe in Barbara Kafka's Soup: a Way of Life.
In a saucepan, bring stock, beans, carrots and tomato mixture to a slow boil. Mix in pasta and cook until noodles are soft, about 10 minutes. You need to stir it every minute or two, so the bottom does not scorch. Add parsley and garlic, cook a minute longer and serve.
See you after Christmas! I am planning out my reading list post for the end of 2009.
posted evening of December 20th, 2009: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Recipes
I'm wondering how many of the characters in The Savage Detectives are real people from Bolaño's cohort in D.F. in the mid-70's. According to infrarrealismo.com, Ulises Lima is based on Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro*; clearly Arturo Belano is Bolaño himself. I am assuming GarcÃa Madero is made-up, and that the Font family must be based at least loosely on real people. The rest of the Visceral Realists must be a mix of real poets and inventions...
A couple of videos for your viewing pleasure and enlightenment. From paledave at Orbis TerQuintus, an animated visualization of The Known Universe, from the surface of the earth to 5 billion light years away, and back. It is done by the American Museam of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art -- I have seen similar productions before, this one is really graceful and pretty.
I have seen a lot of links over the past few days to this story about the observation of tool use by octopodes in Indonesia -- today my dad sent me the link and I finally went and took a look. Thanks, dad! Pretty amazing to watch:
I will never forget your kindness and your breakfast.
A friend at work has been recom-mending movies to Ellen; so far her picks have been fantastic. Tonight we watched Bread and Tulips, about its heroine's escape from her unsatisfactory, stifling home life into a world of romance and creativity -- it caught both of us up and took us out of ourselves into its Venice. The anarchist florist and the gossipy holistic masseuse, the sentimental Icelandic waiter, the bumbling would-be P.I.; I just wanted to dive into the screen and live with them. This is the right way to make entertainment.
posted evening of December 19th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
The proprietor of Condalmois reading the new collection of essays about The Big Lebowski, and digging it -- it has convinced him he needs to watch the movie.
It is a lovely cold-weather soup, and vegetarian if you do not use chicken stock; adapted pretty freely from a larger recipe in Barbara Kafka's Soup: a Way of Life.
The proprietor of Condalmo 