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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.
I met up with Miriam and Jon last night to go see The Shirts. This time they were playing Cha Cha's, on the Coney Island boardwalk, and they were completely in their element. A very different experience from watching them at Arlene's Grocery on the Lower East Side -- the crowd was a Brooklyn crowd, probably half of the audience was made up of a big extended family whose yearly reunion at Cha Cha's coincided with The Shirts' date... Listening to the crowd sing along on the chorus of "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" warmed the cockles of my heart.
It's been a long time since I've been at Coney Island at night. That is the best time there. The crowds of tourists thin out, the gray dusk of evening and the darkness of night settle over the beach and the water -- the few people still out walking on the sand are black silhouettes against the dark water. Then you turn your gaze back inland and get a fever of brightly colored neon shapes and hawkers yelling, rides sliding past and spinning around, smells of fried food and sunburnt bodies...
Miriam and Jon and I had dinner at Tatiana's in Brighton Beach and walked down the boardwalk in the gloaming. When we got to Cha Cha's, we were happy to find Bill and Brian of Shanghai Love Motel and their S.O.'s, Lisa and Maia rocking out to The Shirts' pop beat. A great way to spend a Saturday evening.
posted morning of August 14th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about The Shirts
A bit frustrating: last night's vivid dream was a dream explicitly about words; but the vividly recalled portion of the dream is all visual imagery and context, no words.
In the dream, I am writing a poem and think of a line that I want to use in it, a poorly-remembered line from a Salt-n-Pepa song. I bring up Google to check my memory of the lyric. Somehow Google will not give me the transcribed lyrics to the song, I can only find the song's video on YouTube. So I start watching it and listening. It is a fantastic, breathtaking video, with references to film noir and to Kurosawa, one that brings out resonances and meanings in the song that I have never understood before. But it is distracting and frustrating to be watching it and listening for a particular line, and trying to keep in mind the poem that I was writing and the way I wanted to use the line. The video is very long -- long enough to be divided into mutiple parts on YouTube -- and I wake up before I find the line I am looking for.
posted morning of August 12th, 2011: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Dreams
Darcus Howe speaks to BBC News about the riots in London. The interviewer* does not hear a word he's saying.
Update: Mr. Howe appears on today's Democracy Now!
*(Indeed "interviewer" seems like the wrong word here.)
posted morning of August 10th, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about Politics
This is an exciting find: when Steerforth is growsing to Copperfield about his lack of ambition and drive, he makes reference to his childhood --
At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognised for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care," and became food for lions --
and my mind leaps of course to my own childhood, and to Pierre. But wait! How could Dickens have known of Sendak's work?... Clearly Sendak was taking off from an older source. I wonder what it was? Not finding much of anything with Google.
Here is something that has been puzzling me about David Copperfield (which I've been reading, and lazily enjoying, for the past week or so): When David travels from his mother's home in Suffolk (northeast of London) to the school Murdstone sends him to, which I'm pretty sure was described as being near London though I can't find that now, he travels by way of Yarmouth, which is southwest of London (assuming Google Maps is not misleading me) -- and similarly, I believe, when he travels to work at Murdstone and Grinby. This doesn't make any sense to me. It is certainly possible I got mixed up about the location of the school; but in any case why would the carriage from Suffolk to Yarmouth not stop over in London? Never mind all that -- Google Maps is indeed misleading me. The Yarmouth referenced here is Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, fairly close to where David and his mother lived. (It is still farther away from London than is Suffolk, but I can easily imagine it to lie on a main road which bypasses David's mother's house.)
Also -- I wonder what age David is when he goes to work for Murdstone and Grinby. I've been thinking it is roughly in the range of ten to twelve, but I don't think that was stated in the text, it is just a guess. (The first time in the book that David mentions his age is when he is fallen in love with the eldest Miss Larkins, near the end of his time at Dr. Strong's school, and he is 17 -- I think that could fit with him being about 11 at the time he's working in London.)
Joyce Hinnefeld has a remarkable new piece at The Millions, under the title Why Rent? On Our Lost Pursuit of Property. Hinnefeld manages to interweave the patterns of her own life, of her own destiny, with the Manifest Destiny of the United States, with the poetry of Frost and of Williams, with the historic patterns of land use and conservation in the Northeast, and ultimately with the "Homeownership Society" and the foreclosure crisis. A fascinating read.
This weekend I read Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations, without knowing much more about it than that I had seen it recommended a number of times over the years in pretty glowing terms. I found it, well, pretty disappointing -- went in hoping for great literature and found a couple of flashes of genius surrounded by 200 pages of a well-crafted lack of inspiration.
What is frustrating about the book is it seems to me like the author knew his work was lacking in inspiration, in vivacity -- he almost tries to make that the book's selling point. The complex structure of the book (which is about its most interesting feature) can be simplified as: a series of frames within frames; in each enclosing frame, an author is failing to find the needed inspiration to write the story in the enclosed frame. It sort of seems like a great book could be written with that structure, if the author were, say, Joseph Heller. But here it is ultimately just the chronicle of Josipovici trying and failing to write Goldberg: Variations -- my reaction is, if you can't write the book, then don't write it, or at least don't publish it...
There are definitely moments of genius and of beauty in the book; for me, they are not enough to recommend reading it. If I were asked for a one-word description of it, my reply would be "Stultifying."
posted evening of August first, 2011: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Readings
The hiss of the cicadas in the trees behind our house is at its peak this evening -- really reverberating through our entire second floor. (It's a sound I love, for which small mercy I give thanks.) As I was listening to the buzzing just now a new approach hit me to a problem of tense that I'd been batting around a few weeks ago:
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
by Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Thus spoke el maestro
de Tarca:
Catch the cicada
by its wing
At least
you're holding in your hand
its song.
I believe this is both truer to the source and better sounding, more poetic, than what I had previously.
probably half of the audience was made up of a big extended family whose yearly reunion at Cha Cha's coincided with The Shirts' date... Listening to the crowd sing along on the chorus of "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" warmed the cockles of my heart. 
Then you turn your gaze back inland and get a fever of brightly colored neon shapes and hawkers yelling, rides sliding past and spinning around, smells of fried food and sunburnt bodies...
This is an exciting find: when Steerforth is growsing to Copperfield about his lack of ambition and drive, he makes reference to his childhood -- 
This weekend I read Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations, without knowing much more about it than that I had seen it recommended a number of times over the years in pretty glowing terms. I found it, well, pretty disappointing -- went in hoping for great literature and found a couple of flashes of genius surrounded by 200 pages of a well-crafted lack of inspiration.
