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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.
Some idle Googling the other day brought me to Mercedes GarcÃa-Arenal and Fernandez RodrÃguez-Mediano's essay on Miguel de Luna, Arabic Christian from Granada and thence to de Luna's True History of King Roderic... Lots to read... (And can it really be true that de Luna's True History has never been translated into English? It seems strange to think such a thing but I am not finding it anywhere. This looks like a pretty key bit of history of literature to me...)
posted evening of February first, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Don Quixote
Examinando más tarde la declaración del San Jerónimo -- Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor me in interpretatione Graecorum absque scripturis sanctis ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu -- escribe Bellos que el San Jerónimo quizás trataba sobre un verdadero problema para los traductores: ¿cómo tratar los expresiones que no entiendes? En la lectura y la plática cotidiana nos acostumbramos a pasar por encima de tales expresiones, el sentido interpretando del contexto.
Peter of Conscious Entitieslinks to a talk on theories of consciousness by Eric Schwitzgebel, author of Perplexities of Consciousness. Check it out: a thoroughly interesting presentation. (Note that Schwitzgebel's claim that countries should be considered conscious entities is completely compatible with Jaynes' idea of consciousness as a metaphorical, language-based activity.)
Date cuenta del cantar de las lÃneas telefónicas suspendidas, la vibración de antenas de los carros dados ciertas rapideces medias espantosas. --un fenómeno similar, eolian, es ‘flutter’, por causa de vórtices abajo de los cables...
Consider the singing of suspended telephone lines or the vibration of a car antenna at certain mid-gruesome speeds. (A similar aeolian phenomenon is “flutter,†caused by vortices on the leeward side of the wire, distinguished from “gallop†by its high-frequency, low-amplitude motion.) To do so would be synonymous with considering the Kármán vortex street: a term in fluid dynamics for a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of a fluid’s flow over bluff bodies.
(this playlist is preceded aurally by the playing of "Harvest Home" on my fiddle. Its object is mainly to ascertain how many songs in a row my computer can randomize that will keep me interested. And yes, obscurely a manner of bragging about my music collection I guess. For whatever good that does. I'd be glad to put the playlist on a disc and send it to you if you'll pay me potsage, drop me a line. Or better yet you can listen to the first d tracks of the playlist at dtracks.com.)
q. "Free as a Bird" by the Beatles.
a. "Nashville Blues" by the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band
z. "Chain Mary to the Bed" by Robyn Hitchcock
w. "Ecstasy" by Crooked Still
s. "Winter Love" by Onkel Jose (off of Glass Flesh)
x. "Cold Rain and Snow" by the Grateful Dead
e. "Over You" by the Soft Boys
d. "Too Long" by the Mississippi Sheiks
c. "Caroline Says â…¡" by Robyn Hitchcock and some dialog from him off of Jewels for Sophia,
Hello, you've reached Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese's classic tale of Italian-American manhood, starring Ray Liotta, Bob DeNiro, and Joe Pesci. Unfortunately we're all busting each other's <bleep> at the moment.
Hmm. 50 min... or depending on how many times you repeat it, potentially forever. Many songs on this list that I would like to play and/or sing. (I got the borderline crazy idea that "The L&N don't stop here anymore" lyrics would sound really great sung to the tune of "Nashville Blues". And "Ecstasy"? Yes, "Winter Love", yes...(Other songs that would fit in this general arrangement and key: "Who'll Rock the Cradle," "Sweet Baby's Arms." And on this very mix, "Things ain't what they used to be" is at least a closely related arrangement and key.))
Me and Sylvia were watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with Monique's family. I was initially a bit surprised that we were deeming it age-appropriate for the younger kids; but it turned out Bree-Ann was totally into the book, and kept piping up to say what was going to happen. The remote control for Monique's entertainment center had way too many buttons and knobs on it and I could not figure out how to operate it.
posted morning of January 27th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
"A Love Which Belongs to the Other Door," the last story and the longest, takes another look, through a different glass, at the subject of Zlatica Didic and his son Zlatko Didic, whom Zupcic (Slavko son of Slavko) first visited in his story "Letters Towards a Novel". Zlatko starts off by saying, "I began writing this story almost twenty years ago..." and suddenly I get a much clearer, more moving vision of the (to be sure small) body of his work -- it all comes together.
