We say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head.
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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 dead of 9/11
are photographed
and silent
and the crater they fell into long since filled
with detritus of 21st C. dreams in America
and ragged strips of newsprint
without any columns of ink,
they're blank and they're torn. and the
names of the dead
scroll by beneath the image
of America.
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream — a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows — is essentially poetry.
El sueño no es revelación. Si al soñador un sueño lo permiterÃa ahorrar algún luz sobre si mismo, no realice ese descubrimiento la persona de ojos cerrados sino la de ojos abiertos y lúcidos suficientamente para los pensamientos juntos a unirse. El sueño —entre las sombras chispea el miraje— en su esencia es poesÃa.
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