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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.
Reading some notes from a while back I happened on the name of Lina Meruane, a Chilean author, and a recent book of hers. Sangre en el Ojo is a memoir (fictionalized, I don't know to what extent — what I've been able to find online suggests that Dr. Meruane, who teaches at NYU, does have juvenile diabetes; but this is presented as a work of fiction, so I'm taking the Lina Meruane who is the book's main character as a distinct person from the Lina Meruane who wrote it) of losing her vision from hemorrhage caused by diabetes. The story is set in New York and Santiago de Chile, we meet Lina (a graduate student, if I've understood correctly) in 2001 just as she begins to lose her vision; the first chapters have some mesmerizing descriptions of looking at the bleeding in her eyes.
posted evening of September third, 2013: 1 response ➳ More posts about Readings
I have been writing a lot of poetry lately, much of which has not really taken any shape yet, in both English and Spanish. Here are a couple passages in English that seem worth expanding on.
Act out this savage pantomime
in the distance
crickets
in the distance
the voices of your
subjunctive
saviors
and you stumble thru the steps
of some long forgotten scene
of some brutally ironic
forgotten scene.
and sometimes it can help to be brutally honest
to tell the truth I mean
and to deceive
deceive with honesty
so to speak
deceive with savage apathy
passivity
liquidity and self-congratulation:
conflating
to seed the pastures
of some chaotic Babylon
imagined.
and the insect hum behind the melody
pervasive rhythmic ambiance
Not a form of beauty but of void, this binary
now, so what--
Void is imperceptible when it's cloaked in a mask of being
Void here should be taken to mean Nullity
and our Reality/ is riddled through
is torn asunder by infinite
void and void and voids/ impossible
to pluralize this empty heart
of being.
and the minutes are like hours, like idle, carefree hours
forgotten as they pass.
Forgotten as the second hand
ticks by on some imagined sundial
as streams/ evaporate
into desert
as protostellar nuclei condense
volcanic
intrinsic to our nature/ even
as the void repulses us
¶ and the insect hum behind the melody pervasive
and basic to nature
intrinsic
to meaning.
to say the minutes pass like hours predictable creeping by
o verminous horde, to say
to say you've said all this before, to call the riddle
meaningless and petty
To get behind the riddle to its source, to its creator/
interact for God's sake
and call it growth, and chalk it up
to destiny
so sliding frame by frame by
these episodes and episodic memories
of our ill-spent youths
and current circumstances
different pathways and strands of meaning surround you
encroach on your experience of the moment
your sense of reality
so to speak
you've come unstuck in time and out of luck
so walk your pilgrim's path
so celebrate your misfortune
grin
at the indeterminate slices
of subjunctive structure that enframe you.
My reaction to J. Sáez de Ibarra's "Las Meninas" on the first few readings was one of excitement and confusion. The first section -- "Bocetos/Sketches", which makes up the body of the story -- is gripping and interesting, but has no resolution; the second section, "Las Meninas" is just a page. It appears to be the character Juan Felipe describing the positions of all the members of the household in the photo which was soon to be taken at the end of the first section, and which is reproduced very unclearly on the facing page; under which appears a subtitle listing the figures represented, but by different names. Confusing. The key, as it took me a long time to figure out, is the "photo" -- it is a print of Diego Velázquez' painting "Las Meninas" (1656), a portrait of king Juan Felipe IV's household. The painting is the centerpiece of the story -- "Bocetos" is serving to set up the characters who appear in the painting -- which is for the purposes of the story not a 1656 painting but a photograph of a contemporary celebrity's household. Accepting all this requires some pretty twisted suspension of disbelief -- eg it is kind of difficult to accept the dwarfs Nicolás Pertusso and hydrocephalic Maria Bárbola as Juan Felipe's adolescent son and the prostitute with whom he spent the night -- and adds a new dimension to the story, completes it.
I cranked out a couple tunes at the NJ Fiddle Contest at Howel Farm. (to wit, Halting March and The Rd to Lisdoonvarna) -- My strategy of practicing everything a shade slower than it should be performed has really paid off.
(On the other hand, of course, I realize now that I've been recording these songs at practice speed rather than performance -- I should record a new version of the Halting tape.)
Occasionally in the past I've blogged about books that I come to with no idea at all in advance, what to expect. Sáez de Ibarra's Mirar al agua is one such. I first came upon the author's name and the title a few weeks ago when Marta Aponte recommended it. This is always a fun way to read, completely free of expectations.
The first couple of stories I've so far just skimmed the first lines of, not found much of anything to draw me in. "Las Meninas" (left) I find fascinating, a story told entirely in dialog, extremely fast-pased. I find it renders very nicely in English. "Una ventana en Via Spermazella" and the next few stories seem very interesting but have not been quite able to crack the code that will get me into the stories. Especially intriguing among these is "La PoesÃa del Objeto."
"La superstición de Narciso" is just spellbinding. More experimental than anything else thus far. "Escribir Mientras Palestina" (which I'm midway into now) is a nicely engaging piece of first-person narrative about a visit to Palestine.
posted morning of August 18th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
Reading some notes from a while back I happened on the name of Lina Meruane, a Chilean author, and a recent book of hers. Sangre en el Ojo is a memoir (fictionalized, I don't know to what extent — what I've been able to find online suggests that Dr. Meruane, who teaches at NYU, does have juvenile diabetes; but this is presented as a work of fiction, so I'm taking the Lina Meruane who is the book's main character as a distinct person from the Lina Meruane who wrote it) of losing her vision from hemorrhage caused by diabetes. The story is set in New York and Santiago de Chile, we meet Lina (a graduate student, if I've understood correctly) in 2001 just as she begins to lose her vision; the first chapters have some mesmerizing descriptions of looking at the bleeding in her eyes. 
I cranked out a couple tunes at the NJ Fiddle Contest at Howel Farm. (to wit, Halting March and The Rd to Lisdoonvarna) -- My strategy of practicing everything a shade slower than it should be performed has really paid off.
author's name and the title a few weeks ago when Marta Aponte recommended it. This is always a fun way to read, completely free of expectations.
Especially intriguing among these is "La PoesÃa del Objeto."