Although I have done it all these thirty years or more, although I live my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, still I think that there are few activities so worthy of inspection as the reading of novels.
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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 really striking passages are popping up in this collection of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poetry. Sound, listening, singing, sirens,...
y el mar es ceniciento
tiembla dulce inquieto
como una paloma
Agua confusa
como el ruido de popa que escucho
en la sombra
del
sueño
Hay niebla que nos borra
Tal vez nace un rÃo por aquÃ
Escucho el canto de las sirenas
El sol roba la ciudad
No se ve más
Ni siquiera las tumbas resisten demasiado
Below the fold a stunning elegy. Who is the translator? Not credited in the linked file -- possibly it is Luis Muñoz, his is the only name I am finding as a translator for Ungaretti in a few tries via Google.
I never realized this -- yesterday I was thinking about the King Midas legend (amid all the talk of wealth passing me right by...) and it occurred to me that Midas' golden touch must be, loosely and remotely, a root for Vonnegut's idea of ice-9.
A great party this evening! Some friends gave me books. Thanks, Janis! Thanks, Mariana!
Becoming Jimi Hendrix
Antigua vida mÃa
Manual de pintura y caligrafÃa
El siglo de las sombras
La culpa
Peanuts Guide to Life
Other friends gave me bottles of wine, also much appreciated; and Ellen and Sylvia gave me a spatula in the form of a Stratocaster. (Spatucaster? Stratula?)
posted evening of May 18th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Birthdays
That rare treasure arrived in today's mail, a book towards which I have no predjudices one way or the other... All I know about Michael Stutz' Circuits of the Wind is that its protagonist is roughly my coeval and vaguely that he grows up with computers and hacking and such.* A wonderful epigraph from Ecclesiastes sheds a little light on the title:
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north ; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
I'm sort of sniffing around the edges of the book trying to figure out how to approach it now, looking at the epigraphs and the dedication and acknowledgements (to among others, "the gurus, Daniel Frank Kirk [this Daniel F Kirk? this Daniel Kirk?] and Irwin Allen Ginsberg" and "Bill Burroughs for the blessing")... Some fun stuff.
*(Well and that its author considers READIN a worthy target for a review copy, which I'll grant is a big prejudicial point in his favor.)
posted evening of May 16th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Two birds beautiful of wing and close companions sit on the same tree.
One eats the sweet fruit, the other watches from above.
Our two selves sit on the tree of life, one seer, full of light and love, the
other consumer, eating the sweet fruit. Shaking sin and virtue from its wings
and becoming stainless, the consumer becomes a seer and sorrows cease
This passage, from a Nov. 1960 letter from Billy to Brion, I am finding almost unbearably perfect, evoking disparate threads from Beckett to Carroll to Pynchon... This needs to be quoted in bold and with underlining (some editorial, some present in the "original"). Burroughs is pitching an idea for Brion to write in the voice of Hassan-i Sabbah, for Reader's Digest...
LOOK OUT at all times. See what was in front of you. Can a man see what is front of him with all his friends and enemies talking in his ear? Stop talking to yourself. Ah this shocks you? Listen: Words should be your servants. Use them. Do not let them use you. And when you do not need them send them to sleep. How to? Learn to know the word your servant. Look at words. Listen. Listen out at all time. Look and listen out at all times. Take any simple phrase like I am That I am. Repeat it. Now pass it back and forth through a sieve of punctuation. See the words changing meaning as the period rotates. Now change the position of the words. Now translate into other languages. You are stuck in word slots. You do not hear. Cut the word lines. And step out into silence. It is yours. It is everybody's. You do not see the trees when you walk down the street because of ‘The ’‘Word ’‘Tree’. Look at the word tree. Look? at the word tree. Look at? the word tree. Look at the? word tree. Look at the word? tree. Word look at the tree? Tree look at the word? Etc. Now look at the tree and you will see the tree not the word tree. You will begin to see everything sharp and clear like after a rain.
