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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.
Det Perfekte Manneske (1967) by Jørgen Leth. It is the inspiration and raw materials for Lars von Trier's (and Leth's) 2003 film The 5 Obstructions. (I'm a little puzzled about the English; in von Trier's film the clips of Leth's film are in Danish, but that does sound like Leth's voice. Maybe he made two copies of it with the voiceover in Danish and English. I can't find the Danish on the web.)
posted afternoon of July 11th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
This beginning is fairly characteristic of the stories in Brodie's Report -- the narrator (who is often identifiably Borges) distances himself from the story he is telling. He introduces it as a story he heard years ago, that he doesn't remember, quite, and is embroidering with his own inventions -- sometimes (eg "Unworthy") the character who is telling the enclosed story explicitly expects Borges to weave a story out of it, to decorate it with knife fights and lawlessness.
Honestly. Blu's animated grafittis just keep getting better, more powerful, more beautiful. Today via The Wooster Collective I see he has (they have?) a new piece, Big Bang Big Boom — a "short unscientific story about evolution and his consequences":
Update: Also, Blu's first book is in the stores (well, at least one store). You can get Blu 2004-2007 from Studiocromie, 24 €. (And of course the shipping -- outside of Europe you will pay 25 € to have the book sent to you. Inside Europe it is 19 €, still quite steep.) The World's Best Evertakes a look inside; and more photos at ekosystem.org.
posted afternoon of July 5th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Graffiti
In two or three pieces in Alma del suburbio, Carriego approached the epic; others were closer to social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
-- Borges, foreword to Versos de Carriego
Here are Carlos Gavito and Marsela Duran, tangoing to Eduardo Rovira's "A Evaristo Carriego." The orchestra is the Boston Pops.
* (or "omnipresent sacred rabble" maybe? di Giovanni renders it "cosmic holy rabble".)
At the opening of "Juan Muraña" (the fifth story in Brodie's Report), Borges refers back to a biography of Evaristo Carriego which he wrote in 1930 (and which I see was translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in 1984*) -- his old classmate Trápani mentions the book by way of asking what Borges knows of "malevos," a word which I am not finding in the dictionary but which Hurley translates as "fighters and thugs and underworld types." ("Gangsters" seems like it might work just as well...)
I took the opportunity to have a look at Borges' foreword to Versos de Carriego, a selection which he edited in 1964** -- it is giving me another bit of nuance about the Argentine literary tradition Borges is coming out of. Previously I had been thinking the knife fighting in his Argentine stories was a reference to gauchesca literature, the literature of the pampas; but in this foreword he writes,
Esteban EcheverrÃa was the first chronicler of the pampas; Evaristo Carriego, it appears, was the first chronicler of the arrabales [suburban slums around Buenos Aires].
There is knife fighting in gauchesca literature, but the knife fighting in the stories in Brodie's Report all takes place in the slums around Buenos Aires; the reference here is not to gauchos but to malevos.
Below the fold, a little more from the foreword, which makes Carriego's work sound fairly important to the evolution of Argentine literature. Carriego's complete works are online at Proyecto Biblioteca Digital Argentina.
Carriego could not have carried out his works without the enormous freedom of vocabulary, of theme and of meter which Modernism granted to the literatures of the Spanish tongue, both on this side and on the other side of the ocean; but the Modernism which was his stimulus was also his enemy. A good portion of Heretic Masses is given over to involuntary parody of DarÃo and of Herrera. But beyond these pages, and beyond the rest, the discovery (let's call it that) of our suburbs is the most valuable contribution of Carriego.
And
I know little of his political inclinations -- a likely guess is that he was vaguely, eloquently an anarchist. [which cf Borges' statements about his own politics in the foreword to Brodie's Report.]... He worked ceaselessly, driven by the soft mania of the tubercular. ... He died twenty-nine years of age, at the same age and of the same disease as John Keats. Both men had a hunger for fame -- [this last bit I am finding very hard to understand, not sure whether from a language problem or a complexity problem:]
la pasión era lÃcita en aquel tiempo, ajeno todavÃa a las malas artes de la publicidad.
* di Giovanni wrote an essay on "Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer," which one can read in part at Google Books.
** (Also included in Prologos is a foreword to Roberto Godel's Birth by Fire -- In "Juan Muraña," Borges mentions that Godel was in school with him and Trápani.)
↻...done
posted evening of July 4th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Prólogos
Michael Gakuran blogs his visit to Hashima Island, an abandoned coal mining town off the west coast of Japan. Lots of beautiful photography -- this picture reminds me very strongly of My Neighbor Totoro, for some reason.
Thanks to a note at The Wooster Collective, I see that Hampton Beach, NH held its annual sand-castle competition last week; pictures of the winning sculptures are up at hamptonbeach.org. My favorite is Marielle Heesels' entry, "Drowning in Love":
As it turns out, we were in Hampton Beach once, about 8 years back. In July, 2002 I took a chair-building class at Mike Dunbar's Windsor Institute, just down the road from there in Hampton. One of the earliest pictures from our family album, Sylvia on the beach mugging for the camera:
Estaba compilando, me dijo, una copiosa antologÃa de la obra de Baruch Spinoza aligerada de todo ese aparato euclidiano que traba la lectura y que da la fantástica teorÃa un rigor ilusorio.
Fischbein was putting together, as he told me, a collection of the work of Baruch Spinoza, shorn of this whole Euclidian business which hinders the reading experience and which lends the bizarre theory some rigor, some illusory rigor.
The first page of "Unworthy" has me scurrying to find out a little more about Spinoza, bizarre theories lent an illusory rigor by a Rube Goldberg Euclidian apparatus sounds like just my cuppa tea... I spend a little time looking at his Short Treatise on God, Man and Human Welfare and am finding it... strange. Not "difficult to parse," which has often been my experience reading philosophy, but just wrong-headed. Statements like "So since man has an idea of God it is clear that God must exist formally" have me scratching my head and wondering what Spinoza makes of unicorns and leprechauns, and flying spaghetti monsters... Statements like "Since Nothing can have no attributes, the All must have all attributes" have me shaking my head and muttering that that does not follow, all your capitalization and italics will not make it follow. All this head-scratching and head-shaking and muttering is making it hard to get anywhere with the text. (It was fun to find out, though, that I can nearly read Dutch -- if I squint just right and have the translation to hand -- I had never thought to look much at Dutch before but the description I've heard of it as being halfway between German and English seems just about right.)
John came over today; we played almost exclusively new songs, songs that we've played at most once or twice before, plus the two songs we'll be playing on Thursday at the open mic. Before he came over, I had been working on a tune that was in my head, without being able to figure out what it was -- turns out what I was thinking of was the chorus of "Frim Fram Sauce"; but not knowing that we just played through it together a couple of times, and came up with a bridge. Might be nice to learn the lyrics and try that one out. Other songs we played:
social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
