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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.
At the beginning of chapter 10 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, Idilio Montaño is passed out in a corner of the schoolroom where the friends are staying, sleeping off his drunken fight of the previous night. As he comes to, he hears an old pampino telling a group of young men the history of John Thomas North's acquisition of the majority of the nitrate fields in northern Chile. This expository technique seems like it should be extremely heavy-handed but I think Rivera Letelier pulls it off. Anyway, I found the history lesson quite useful.
"...This English upstart is the best example of what I'm talking about. His name was John Thomas North and they called him 'The Saltpetre King." It was this proud commoner who instigated, who provided arms and pounds sterling to secure the downfall of Balmaceda, the last rightful president of Chile..."
According to the speaker, Balmaceda intended to nationalize Chile's nitrate resources; North owned vast amounts of the Atacama as a result of having purchased Chile's worthless bonds during the War of the Pacific. North is only dead about ten years at the time of the strike, and the speaker claims to have met him in person. He says the pampinos would joke about "Our Father who art in London..."
Interesting to think about how close to their country's history these characters are. This scene makes me think (in a US context) of an elderly Civil War veteran telling some young compatriots about a famous general he had met... Or to put it in the labor context, a grizzled old Teamster or Longshoresman telling about... My familiarity with labor history in the US (and indeed with US history in general) is far too limited to build a satisfactory scenario for either of these examples, alas.
I was happy to stumble upon Dion Chrysostom's 11th discourse, Maintaining that Troy was not captured. Kirill Yeskov cites Chrysostom as "the founder of this literary tradition of playing with others’ masks and backdrops" -- Chrysostom argues that Homer cannot be trusted as a reliable narrator, that the Achæans were in fact defeated at Troy. A refreshing read. Chrysostom's To Plato in defense of Homer has been lost to the ages.
posted evening of February 24th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Iliad
If you're in Copenhagen this week, make sure to check out John Kenn's showing of monstrous Post-it® art at MOHS exhibit. The exhibit is titled "Office-space and beyond" and opens on Thursday. If you're not in Denmark you can always follow Kenn's creations at his blog.
posted afternoon of February 21st, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about Comix
Thanks to Rex Broome and to neighbor Dan Rosen for introducing me to House. My recording with Dan of Saint Etienne's "Stoned, to say the least" will appear on Rex's 39-40 Covers project tomorrow. A lot of fun playing and recording this, it seems like almost the perfect music for me -- repetitive improvisation over a fixed beat is about my favorite violin activity...
What a fortuitous coincidence, to have connected with Dan at the same time Rex asked me to cover Saint Etienne! I met Dan last December, at Woody and Lisa's Solistice party; and two weeks ago we started taking the same train in to the city for work, and talking about music as we ride in. So it seemed like a natural thing to ask Dan for help with this cover; he came through in a big way!
(Update: Post #2500 for this humble blog! Halfway there, woo-hoo!)
posted evening of February 20th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
(via everywhere on the Internet. Thanks for hipping me to this, Martha!)
(Post title is my non-Japanese-speaking attempt to render "Pictures of the floating girl" -- a pun which I am shocked to find has not yet been made elsewhere, in English anyways, if Google can be trusted.)
Crabfu Artworks presents a walking machine powered by Princess, a pet Roborovski Dwarf Hamster -- huge fun and quite confusing for the Crabfu cat... The machine is a miniature version of Theo Jansen's Strandbeest PVC pipe creations which wander the beaches of Holland. Here is a 3sat Kulturzeit program on Jansen and his creatures:
Jansen gave a TED talk about his project in March, 2007.
...Also fun: Jansen and his pets make their appearance on Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention (a show of whose existence I am happy to learn... a few other episode clips on this playlist on Youtube).
Blogger Alison Sampson has uploaded scans of Alberto Breccia's comic El hombre azul (1978) -- thanks for the link, Domingos! Breccia was an Argentine cartoonist, working from the mid-20th-Century to the 90's; definitely looks worth finding out more about him. I see he illustrated texts by Ernesto Sabato, Lovecraft, and Poe, among others...
posted morning of February 19th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
...but the leading contender by a long shot (AOTW)* is my second choice, Sciencemastering Lair. Go over to Scenes from a Multiverse to cast your vote for your favorite Famous Destination -- whichever destination wins gets a full week of story-line (next week? I am not sure. It seems like a lot of cartooning to get together on very short notice. Possibly it is the following week or something.)
(I really, really hope Bunnies Planet is not the eventual winner, much as I love it. But also hope that whatever strip wins has Bunnies Planet incorporated into it somehow.)
...A candid shot of Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer is up at Jamie Zawinski's site, jwz.org.
*...And the pattern is holding up; as of Sunday afternoon it is Sciencemastering Lair way out ahead with 55% of the vote, Outer Suburbitron dead last with a measly 6%. Bunnies Planet is dead center between them.)
In today's Salon, Kirill Yeskov 