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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.
The world gives you of itself in chips, in fragments: At bifucaria bifurcata, Rise reports that Wave Press will be publishing Mario Santiago's Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic in translation. You can read the original (which is dedicated to Bolaño and to Kyra Galván) at infrarrealismo.com -- it is 2000 words which seems a bit short for the description "book-length poem" but I imagine the book will have some supplementary material in it as well, and/or the material online is not the complete poem.
The poem has a nicely Tractatus-y quote from Auden as its epigraph: "We must remember here, too, that nothing is beautiful, not even in Poetry, which is not the case." (Back-translated -- I don't know the source of the quotation.)
2. Adaptation
The first of Bolaño's novels to reach the silver screen will be (the as-yet unpublished in translation) Una novela lumpen; Chilean director Alicia Scherson has filmed it as Il Futuro, currently screening at Sundance. The trailer: Thanks for the link, Jorge!
caminamos tú y yo
se anochece en el cielo
como un borracho en el arroyo
visitamos calles desiertos
esquinas quejumbrosas
y otras calles las que sigamos
y que formen argumento
cada vez mas aparente
hacia un propósito muy obvio
lo que sin embargo no podemos llamar
por cualquier nombre
o palabra
Possibly premature (heh) but I have a title page totally thought out for This Silent House... I had been thinking a snippet from "Lullaby for Laura" would be the epigraph, but I just found a JoaquÃn Pasos poem that makes me think of Ãvala: it is the one.
New images from ESA's Mars Express craft have me picturing myself riding a more primitive craft down the river with Huck and Jim... they are crablike hexapods with fringes of symbiotically attached smaller organisms trailing from their undersides... (thanks for the link, Gary!)
El silencio, roto por el repique sordo de un reloj—
A orilla de la calzada harapo mojado, harapo que solÃa ser camisa elegante—
La plaza que se llena de repente con oleada de sombras por delante
de la luz del sol, o de las alas—
El sueño que vuelve al cabo de cuarenta años, de volar por encima de un mar de lino—
Las huellas estampadas como rastros en la nieve
por la tarde disueltos en compunción y lluvia—
Fue aquà que te sentabas, junto al ramo de orquÃdeas
mirando más allá de la puerta del jardÃn, a tu lado la mujer
y el pelo ni siquiera gris—
por Luisa A. Igloria, en via negativa/tr. Jeremy Osner
las sombras y los sueños en que se consisten
las paredes y puertas de la casa en que moro
las palabras y frases que salen a chorros:
en que mi tiempo sea corto insisten
On these pages I record and bequeath
the semi-autobiographical log,
a sort of last will and testament,
perhaps devoid of the Maestro’s
meter, rhythm and rhyme,
a run-away musical score
for a fugue in counterpoint
Colombian poet Luis Zalamea translated Prufrock into Spanish. The Fugue in Counterpoint is his own take on the poem, a take written in 1984 for the collection Voces en el desierto, with an introductory note. (The blog is duopoetico, looks very interesting, a collaboration between Zalamea and his daughter Pilar Kimbrell.)
