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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.
Okay, who knew about this? I did not know about it and now I am blown away, stunned. This is the best thing ever. (Thanks for the link, Henry!)
In 1957, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dalà to paint a series of 100 watercolor illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the greatest literary work written in the Italian language. The illustrations were to be finished by 1965, the 700th anniversary of the poet’s birth, and then reproduced and released in limited print editions. The deal fell apart, however, when the Italian public learned that their literary patrimony had been put in the hands of a Spaniard.
Undeterred, Dalà pushed forward on his own, painting illustrations for the epic poems that collectively recount Dante’s symbolic travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. After Dalà did his part, the project was handed over to two wood engravers, who spent five years hand-carving 3,500 blocks used to create the reproductions of DalÃ’s masterpiece.
Another stab at the story of Laura and Peter's day in the life.
Morning
Laura's wishing Peter would just
Drop this false persona, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he's built a lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him gone. She wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where his
Winding paths are laid,
Blooming crocus in the springtime, blooming
Hostas in the shade, he wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp, I'll never find;
For all I cogitate and pray I'll never
Sit beside your bedside, seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Laura's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
Peter in his sweatshirt and his
Groggy eyes, unshaven, takes the
coffeepot that's sitting
On the table, on the table.
He mumbles some reply to Laura's gaze, he smells the coffee,
Smiles weakly, frets; he says
The weather's beautiful outside this morning,
springtime Sunday morning, says
we ought to take our bikes up to the Glen Trail, take a ride.
 
Afternoon
Laura's in the garden, weeding,
Smiling, legs are aching
From the ride up Union Hill to Chester
fresh now in her memory;
She bends down, and the shadow
Of the mountain laurel's branches
Writes — asemic scripture sliding off her shoulder as she moves.
Peter's sitting reading in the sunshine, drinking coffee,
Now his book lies open on the lawn,
he's watching Laura working,
Dancing slow across the garden,
Yellow t-shirt smudged with topsoil,
Dancing slow across the garden
through the sunlight and the shade.
Evening
Laura's by the bedside, catches
Peter's eye, she smiles and asks him
what's he thinking, work tomorrow, ready for another week?
He yawns and stretches, smiles back, already dreaming some,
he mumbles, says let's take some time off in July, he'll maybe
take some days around the 4th... and fireworks already going
off in the air around them
posted morning of July first, 2012: 2 responses ➳ More posts about SOPOSP
"You'se a Viper" by Stuff SmithHarlem Hamfats [wow! I always thought this was originally a Stuff Smith tune! He was covering Hamfats] -- this is Dale Burleyson and the 4th St. NiteOwls performing a truly spectacular cover version. Dig the washboard, dig the pedal steel and clarinet solos -- fast forward to 20:30:
Or really, don't -- watch the whole concert, get a "Viper" treat midway in. This is the NiteOwls performing a year ago at Barbes -- tonight Ellen and I are going to see them at Tierney's. Can't wait! They are opening for Ruby on the Vine, whose new album is included in the admission.
posted afternoon of June 30th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Songs
I want to think about this story (or poem, or poem-story) I am trying to write, without actually working (right now) on writing it -- analyze what I have, what I'm looking for, how to get there, whether it is worth while. Suddenly realized this morning that this blog would be an agreeable venue for such a project -- a journal is the right place for thinking about the writing process. Maybe I'll come up with something useful, maybe not.
What I have right now, what seems like a well-crafted kernel for a SOPOPS† -- a lovely fun, sing-song meter that is reminding me a bit of "The Raven" and occasional rhyme; two characters Lauren and Peter in a stable, complex relationship, living together, maybe not connecting with each other quite as much as they'd like to, needing and not always finding each other's support; I have the setting as a smallish town, maybe upstate NY, maybe Maryland, and the house they live in, not far from the commercial district of the town. A garden, the the street they live on is not really described yet but I have a vague picture of it in mind -- small houses, the lots are not super-wide but not cramped either. When the story opens it is early morning on a Sunday late in Spring, still pretty dark out but getting light in the east, streetlights are still on. Peter can't sleep, he is walking down the street wishing something was open in town, a shop where he could buy a pack of cigarettes, longing for a little human contact -- and this longing is strange because after all his (wife? long-term girlfriend?) Lauren is back at home, realizing he's not in bed with her, (and the understanding here is that this has been a habit of his, insomnia, not being around early in the morning). Scene changes are kind of loosely spaced here, she's in the bathroom, she hears him downstairs, hopes he's making coffee, then they are both downstairs in the eat-in kitchen with a coffeepot, he's not meeting her eye.
But so now what happens? I'm thinking there was some transaction between them in the last day or two that made the two of them uncomfortable, drove them a little apart, but I'm not sure what it was, quite, and anyway that is more scene-setting, what needs to happen is a plot of some kind that will unfold over the course of the day. Structurally it would be nice to have three chapters, named maybe Morning, Afternoon, Evening, with maybe a Yesterday in between the last two. Hoping the result of whatever happens in the story will be Lauren and Peter feeling a bit more of a connection in the last scene, where they are going to bed Sunday evening, here I could see putting a short bit of conversation, just a couple of lines, and a pleasant visual description of the shadow on the wall by their bedside, possibly even hinted-at hanky panky. So no earth-shattering revelation in other words, just a day in the life, a minor resolution of a minor clash. (Yeah, still nothing in focus, but at least the sense that there is an image there to come into focus.)
* Is this the right name for her? I had "Laura" for a while but last night came to believe that it did not sound quite right. I guess she could also be named "Kathy"... Her husband (or long-term boyfriend) Peter is definitely named Peter. Not sure why but it seems to fit him like a glove.
† The newly-dubbed genre of Story (Or Poem, Or Story-Poem)
posted morning of June 30th, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Poetry
Lauren's wishing Peter would just
Drop this false persona, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he's built a lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him gone. She wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where his
Winding paths are laid,
Blooming crocus in the springtime, blooming
Hostas in the shade, he wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp, I'll never find;
For all I cogitate and pray I'll never
Sit beside your bedside, seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Lauren's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
Still having some trouble figuring out where to take this. It seems like it could potentially make a really good short story in verse; but (a) how fucking pretentious would that be? and (b) I don't have a story, just a setting of the scene and introduction of characters. I guess that's as good a place as any to start at a story, but it's not any significant portion of the whole task.
This morning, riding the train from Mountain Station, I happened to be looking through a notebook of mine, having a hard time pushing myself to write, so just rereading some pieces I've written over the past year or so and fretting about how they are not good enough... I found an early draft of the poem "Morning", which I really enjoyed reading, was even having a hard time picturing anything that could be changed to make it better -- a nice time reading. (But can also be a bit worrysome, like "Hm, well it is not good enough and yet I enjoy reading it; ergo my taste in poetry is poor.") Happily(?), it did not take too many repeated readings to start hearing missed timings and improper tones...
Then this evening, back home, I was looking at my blog and noticed a referral from Orbis Quintus (a READIN-editorial-favorite blog for interesting links about archæology and more, which has been dormant for a while but is back in a big way this past week or so) to an old page of mine, one which coincidentally features midway down a later (second?) draft of the poem in question. Well! It did not take much to persuade myself that that was what I should be working on this evening. It's getting better, the poem, and it was pretty good to start with I think, with just a couple of semi-glaring flaws that came out to me a little more with each rereading. I will post the version I'm working on now a little later.
posted evening of June 29th, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Projects
The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
"Good Old Neon", the fifth story in David Wallace's 2004 collection Oblivion, is just an excruciating story to read. Especially (of course) in light of Wallace's ultimate fate, and especially the last two pages of the story; but even without the author's suicide, even without those last two pages, the story brings the reader unbearably close to the mental process of contemplating suicide and of being driven to contemplate suicide. The act of identifying with the narrator (and of identifying with the author, identifying with his character) is excruciating.
"Once we’d accepted that nothing was ever going to happen in Tristram Shandy, our expectation that anything ought to have started to seem stodgy and humorless." Publisher's Weekly features Tim Kreider on reading Sterne with his mother, during her convalescence.
A newly-translated early work of Calvino's: Into the War is “hand-to hand combat . . . against autobiographical lyricism.†(Thanks for the link, badger!)
I happened to be looking through a notebook of mine, having a hard time pushing myself to write, so just rereading some pieces I've written over the past year or so and fretting about how they are not good enough... I found an early draft of the poem 
