READIN: as of March 02, 2014

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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.

Sunday, March second, 2014

🦋 Visions of Johanna

Best picture of Robyn Hitchcock I was able to get this weekend (and looks like tomorrow's show is going to be snowed out) is this, during the encores last night:

posted morning of March second, 2014: 1 response
➳ More posts about Music

Saturday, March first, 2014

posted morning of March first, 2014: Respond
➳ More posts about Reading aloud

🦋 Gig notes -- Freehold

So there you are with about sixty other Fegmaniax sitting on folding chairs in Mark C.'s studio in Freehold (Central Jersey -- just around the corner from where Springsteen went to high school), everybody's introducing themselves and chatting and feeling psyched for the evening's show. And Robyn Hitchcock comes in! He notes as he walks up to the stage how this venue is a bit like an airplane cabin -- five seats on each side, please keep the center aisle clear; take time to locate the exit nearest you, and if you need to use the restroom, please use the appropriate one for your class. If you think somebody else paid more for their ticket than you did for yours, defer to them. "So everybody was here last time, right? ..." He takes off his coat and picks up his guitar; wearing a hot pink shirt with embroidery and a green scarf that gets tangled in the strap as he takes it off. "I don't wear glasses when I'm performing, I just wanted to see you for a moment -- now I'll return to my womblike state of myopia," and hangs his specs off the side of a lamp next to the mic stand, and starts to play. "You'll never have the damned thing out," he sings, and you sink into the beat of Surgery (Gotta Let Ths Hen Out!, 1985†).

"This is a song about the emotional baggage you carry with you from one relationship to another. I didn't figure that out for about 20 years after I wrote it. Could you give me some delay on the vocals here, Mark, this is sort of a rock & roll sea chanty." The Ghost Ship (You & Oblivion, 1995). I wonder where my love has been, tonight -- "Just imagine I'm Art Garfunkel:" Swirling (Queen Elvis, 1989), which "I wrote when I was in the middle of splitting up with someone, and also splitting up with with the second person... it was a memorable experience." He explains how we have to be angry, or we wouldn't be alive -- so "do you indulge your quite justified rage at existence, or bite the bullet and inherit the earth?"

From here he moves straight into The Devil's Coachman (also from Queen Elvis). A bit of a digression here about how his guitar strings are all worn out -- just yesterday they were fresh and new, like tulips! "But thrash on tulips for a few hours, they're not tulips anymore. You're just beatin' on that daffodil, baby! ...I see we're just over Iceland now." Travel in the future, you learn, will be much easier: just reduce yourself to a powder and FedEx yourself to your destination to be rehydrated. "Wilbur! You're here! Welcome to Marin County." All you've got to do is Ride... (Perspex Island, 1991) "Oxycontin for mama, baby Jesus for the rest of us:" Madonna of the Wasps (Queen Elvis again), going out to P. Buck.

"The practice known as vudu has been around for a long time. (Like most things.) When you wish ill on somebody, a tiny grain inside you dies. But you can't wish well on everybody -- can you? What do you think when you look in the mirror? -- besides wishing for a face lift..." Wax Doll (yes, Queen Elvis).

And now the harmonica is out! Drink a little coffee! ("We proudly brew Starbucks™! ...How else can you brew Starbucks™? shamefacedly?...") And a bit of tuning, tuning "as an agent provocateur, pushing the string farther out of tune and then bringing it back so it sounds better," leads into Queen Elvis (Eye, 1990) A bit of a digression here asking whether the lamp by the mic stand (not the one he hung his glasses on, a different one) is a Tiffany lamp... What distinguishes it from a Tiffany lamp? Could it be made into a Tiffany lamp? Various people from the audience are throwing in commentary, differing on a variety of points, which is good -- "Consensus is very disturbing; if everyone thinks along the same lines it usually means there's some kind of fascism afoot." Maybe tonight you're dreaming... Arms of Love (Respect, 1993). "If you're in Nashville, be sure to stop by the 5 Spot... especially if you like smoke and alcohol, like I do. (I'm from the past, where it's not dangerous.)" More tuning -- "this guitar took a fall today, coming into Amboy, South Amboy, it might be a problem..." -- and One Long Pair of Eyes (Queen Elvis!) is the last of the back-catalogue tunes. He closes out the set with two covers, Oh Yeah by Roxy Music and She Belongs to Me by Tubby the Evangelist, and a new song not yet released*, with the lyric "A window of bliss/ that opened just once/ for the price of a kiss."

The encore happens in Mark's dining room next to the potluck supper, and is 100% Basement Tapes tunes -- "Tiny Montgomery", "Lo and Behold", "Quinn the Eskimo", and "Open the Door, Richard". You have some baked beans and some pasta salad and a beer, and marvel at the glow of happiness on everybody's faces.

†(On the video tape of GLTHO -- It was not released on a record until You & Oblivion)

* (as far as I can tell -- not able to find anything about it on Google or in conversation with other fans.)

posted morning of March first, 2014: 6 responses
➳ More posts about Robyn Hitchcock -- gig notes

Friday, February 28th, 2014

🦋 A full weekend of Robyn Hitchcock shows

We're on our way south -- tonight in Freehold, tomorrow in Bordentown (and snow permitting, Monday in Sellersville). Excited! Will post gig notes.

posted afternoon of February 28th, 2014: Respond

Thursday, February 27th, 2014

🦋 Poem in progress

Here is a poem I have been working on this week. The genesis is as follows: I was thinking about my poem Analogies for Time, and also about the Persistence of Memory. I thought, well, the Persistence of Memory is a suspension of time, time does not progress in a painting, the time on the melting watch will always be 6:55 and the watch will never melt away -- from all this came the line "No hay rÃo para correr a travÃ©s de este paisaje soÃ±ado" -- it's a landscape without a river.

Well: a promising line. I spent a while tossing it around and it is seeming not to be so much a poem about that painting, but about a landscape that is outside of time. (Possibly this landscape could be the setting for the eternal city in "El inmortal".) Here is what I've got so far:

No river flows through this immortal landscape, dry and still.
No hunter seeks the spoor of his hallucinated prey.
The jagged cliffs look down on desert -- cliffs of granite, dreary desert --
static sands untouched by wind or moisture, waiting still
for time eternal, the imagined camera pans and zooms
but finds no hint of motion, no decay,
no sign of change for good or ill.

posted evening of February 27th, 2014: Respond
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Monday, February 24th, 2014

posted evening of February 24th, 2014: Respond
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Saturday, February 22nd, 2014

🦋 Form for an opening

Two short, untitled poems I wrote this week open the same way:

So he tells you
how her ears perked up
and she strained at the leash
as they walked beneath
the rustling maples.
He wondered
what the dog was sensing,
what presence unfelt by her master
the animal knew.
She shook her head and her collar jingled,
and they quickened their pace.

So he tells you
how she looked at the ice
hanging from the eaves of his house
and said it looked like daggers.

("like daggers" is not exactly right, that ending still needs some work.) I'm kind of enchanted with this form, which seems like it would work for fiction as well -- It brings you into the past tense very naturally and sets up a framework of person -- narrator, reader, characters. The narrator here is identified as "he" and the reader as "you", and implicitly "I" am the author, prior to the shift of frame of reference that occurs on the second line; and there does not really need to be any mention of "him" or of "you" after this first clause, depending -- he can refer to himself in the first person and tell his story as "I", or I the author can keep referring to him in the third person.

(Note I don't think this form would work with an omniscient 3rd-person perspective, which is something I have never tried.)