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 Cellist
I'm finding it kind of interesting that the man who eludes death (after she has gone back to work) in Death with Interruptions, is a cellist. Not sure exactly how yet. Here are two pieces of music mentioned in the novel:
J.S. Bach's Suite #6, opus 1012, is the music that death sees on the cellist's stand when she visits him; he later has the music with him at orchestra rehearsal, although he is "merely a cellist in the orchestra... not one of those famous concert artistes who travel the world... he's lucky that he occasionally gets a few bars to play solo." Here it is performed by Mstistlav Rostropovitch:
Chopin's Etude #9 in G♭, from opus 25: a short, jumpy piano tune which the cellist tells his colleagues is the only piece of music in which he can really see himself. Here it is performed by Son Yeol-Eum:
Considering the cellist's life as described in the book I would have thought the piece would be something completely different, very melancholic.. it's weird, it just doesn't fit at all with my impression of the character.
This speaks to what I found dissatisfying about Death with Interruptions -- the two characters are not developed with any kind of verisimilitude -- details are thrown in willy-nilly and without regard for how they contribute to the character's description. It could potentially be an interesting point that the cellist found himself in this short, jumpy piece; but Saramago did not develop this beyond mentioning it.
Meredith Woerner of io9 posts trailers for Blindness. She sounds pretty enthusiastic about the film, which has been re-edited since the negative review I read a few months ago.
