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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 want to try posting a rough translation of the first canto of Gerbasi's "My Father the Immigrant". The loose rhythm and magical language of the poem are seeming to come across into English pretty naturally.
My father, Juan Batista Gerbasi, whose life inspired this poem, was born in a winemaking region on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy; he died in Canoabo, a tiny Venezuelan village hidden away in the wilderness in Estado Carabobo.
We come from the night; and into the night we go.
We leave behind the earth, enveloped in her vapors;
the dwelling place of almond grove, of child and of leopard.
And leave behind our days: lakes, snowstorms, reindeer,
dour volcanoes, enchanted forests
where the blue shadows of fear live.
And leave behind the graves beneath the cypress,
lonely like the grief of distant stars.
And leave behind our glories, torches blown out by secular gusts.
And leave behind our doors, muttering darkly in the wind.
And leave behind our anguish in celestial mirrors.
And time we'll leave behind, time with man's drama:
Progenitor of life, progenitor of death.
Time, which raises up and wears down columns,
Which murmurs from the ocean's multitude.
And leave behind the light which bathes the mountains,
which bathes our children's parks, our altars white.
But also the night with its mournful cities,
quotidian night, no longer even night,
that brief respite, trembling with lightning bugs,
or passing through our souls in savage strokes.
Night which falls again against the light,
awakening the flowers in moody valleys,
remaking the waters' lap among the mountains,
launching horses into clear blue streams;
meanwhile eternity, gleaming golden,
makes its silent way through heavenly fields.
So ever since I tried A Softer World's delicious Black Mischief, I have been playing around with putting coffee in my cocktails; I like the taste and caffeine content alters the intoxication in a pleasant way. Today I think I found a winner, though I'm sorry not to be able to come up with a clever name for it à la Emily Horne. (If you've got any ideas, please suggest them in comments!)
The idea is simple enough; it is essentially a margarita with coffee in place of lime juice, and with a smaller proportion of Triple Sec than you would put in a lime juice margarita (because coffee is not sour). So you fill your glass halfway with iced coffee, add some ice, then a (generous) shot of tequila and a few drops of Triple Sec. A slice of lime is optional; I tried it with and without and it tasted good either way, but somehow the lime seems appropriate. This is a good drink to linger over; the first time I tried it I drank it too fast, because the flavor was so nice, and got inappropriately soused.
posted evening of September 4th, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about Recipes
What fire of darkness, what circle of thunder,
Fell over your visage when you beheld this land?
(making no claims for the quality of that translation/transliteration; I have not read the rest of the poem yet so I don't have any context) -- Gerbasi, a key figure of Venezuelan poetry in the 20th Century, was a son of Italian immigrants; Zupcic's father is an immigrant from Croatia. Several of the stories in this collection are told from the point of view of a Venezuelan named Vinko Spolovtiva, concerning his (absent) Croatian father.
* Dragi is Croatian for "Dear", the salutation at the top of a letter. The story "Letters toward writing a novel" consists in part of letters written by Zlatica Didic to his siblings, and his son, narrating, comments, "There is a word which opens most of the letters: Dragi. According to Bozidar, who translated them, this means something like "dearest". I decided not to translate it: it has a sweet sound, a nice sound. Nigmar thinks it looks like a sunstone -- that seems right to me."
posted afternoon of September 4th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
One of the most arresting passages in Feeding on Dreams -- and one which incidentally made me think of Saramago's All the Names -- is this distinction between official, archival memory in the First World and in Latin America:
Memory is important throughout this book, shading into and conflicting with nostalgia, being lost and refound and disputed and defended; in one of the diary entries from Dorfman's 1990 return to Chile which make up the core of the book, a MAPU comrade of his is telling about a reunion dinner with his Pinochetista parents —
...His mother noticed that he was dragging his left foot slightly as he shuffled towards the living room. "What happened to you, hijo?" she asked. "Did you hurt yourself?"
"You know perfectly well why I'm limping, Mamá. I was tortured, that's why. I'll never walk normally again, you know that."
Tortured? His mother looked at the other members of the family as if to excuse the wayward child and his pranks. Of course the boy hadn't been tortured, hasta cuándo was he going to engage in that sort of political propaganda, let's not dwell on such unpleasant topics...
(in which I take a carving chisel to my fiddle and fail to destroy it)
Ever since I got my Stroh fiddle last May, I have felt like the bridge was not quite accurately fitted to the violin, in in two regards. The way it transmits sound to the resonator is via a brass extension -- the bridge rests on the metal, so vibrations from the strings pass into the brass and move the resonator cap. But the brass ledge is not quite as wide as the feet of the bridge; they extend into the air a few millimeters on either side, so some fraction of the sound is being lost. Not a whole lot I can do about that; but furthermore, the bridge was slightly too tall -- when the strings were at full tension it buckled slightly. This meant the feet were not fully in contact with the brass, and sound was being lost that way as well.
So all this year and a half I have been meaning to whittle a little bit of height off the top of the bridge. It seemed like it would be a really easy repair to make; the odds of screwing up were low and in a worst case scenario, I would only need to replace the bridge. Still I felt squeamish about taking a knife to the fiddle... Tonight after a year and a half of procrastinating, I finally did it -- it was quick and easy and the sound post-repair is noticeably cleaner and brighter than before. Nice! As far as the width of the brass, I think to fix that would involve finding a new brass extension of the correct size -- a narrower bridge would be a poor solution. But for now I am quite content with the fix; doing this kind of work on the instrument brings me into closer contact with it and makes it more fully my fiddle.
Update: This did not really work very well. See this post for an analysis of why not, and what I ended up doing.
posted evening of September third, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:
What he shared with me was the problem that German writers had faced after the Third Reich. "Hitler contaminated the language," he said. "We could no longer write the word comrade, the words joy and exultation and brotherhood. It was kidnapped, the language itself, by the Nazis. That was the task we could not avoid, that is what you must worry most about. Not allowing them to control the language with which you will tell the story of your times. This is something that needs to be done now, before you overthrow Pinochet. It cannot wait till tomorrow or it may be too late."
posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Ariel Dorfman
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by
his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
The Compagnia de' Colombari theater company is going to be performing "More or Less I Am" around the city next week -- it is a musical theater piece based on Whitman's Song of Myself. The Times has a schedule, and you can read a review of an earlier performance at the New Yorker. All performances are free of charge. We're going to the show at The Calhoun School on Friday and looking forward to it!
posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
This post is inspired partly by a conversation I had with Ellen last night. I asked what she thought of the poem I had posted about writing poetry, and she said she thinks that kind of writing is worth while mostly for working it out of your system in order that you can write more immediate poetry... I'm finding interesting that much of Spring and All, at least the prose sections of it, is just this kind of writing about writing, about what I can write and how I can expect the reader to respond to it.
This is from the opening section of Spring and All (perhaps what Williams needs to work out of his system before he can move on to poetry) --
The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day ! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do ? and what do I care ?
I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him : endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways -- but he doesn't exist ! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.
...
And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed -- To the imagination -- you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force -- the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.
In the imagination, we are henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „ I ” I also mean „ you ”. And so, together, as one, we shall begin.
Well, this seems great. I can picture myself saying this, can identify fully with Williams, as he is quite explicitly inviting me to do. Of course my project is not complete there -- I want to say something of my own, that's why I'm writing...
(A side note: the introduction to this edition (New Directions, 2011), written by C.D. Wright, is just great.)
At Political Animal, Steve Benen reflects on shifting cultural perceptions of labor on this labor day. He looks back to Abraham Lincoln's declaration 150 years ago that "Labor is prior to and independent of capital," and wonders for how much longer America will celebrate the hands and backs which build her up and keep her whole.
Keith Houston's latest post at Shady Characters takes him into new territory: today he is examining the history of a mark (or group of marks) that never gained mainstream acceptance, punctuation for indicating irony.
So ever since I tried A Softer World's delicious 
via a brass extension -- the bridge rests on the metal, so vibrations from the strings pass into the brass and move the resonator cap. But the brass ledge is not quite as wide as the feet of the bridge; they extend into the air a few millimeters on either side, so some fraction of the sound is being lost. Not a whole lot I can do about that; but furthermore, the bridge was slightly too tall -- when the strings were at full tension it buckled slightly. This meant the feet were not fully in contact with the brass, and sound was being lost that way as well.
Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:
