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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.
Happy Birthday to Rex Broome! Broome is the singer and guitarist for Skates & Rays. On his 39th birthday last year he covered Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man"; today he covers his own tune "Pushing Forty". In between he has recorded one cover version for every day of his fortieth year of life, and/or leaned on friends to contribute their own cover versions. I'm impressed, and gratified to have played my own small part.
At South Orange Patch, Marcia Worth reports that Mario Sepulveda will be speaking at Seton Hall next week. Sepulveda is one of the copper miners who were trapped underground at Copiapó last year.
Neither should it be forgotten that the 21st of December 1907 wrote in miniature, [and its] defective pantograph would appear imprinted... [on] the morning of 11 September 1973. More or less the same contenders, more or less the same result, more or less the same dead, more or less the same shame, but now all on a gigantic scale.
The events of Chapter 19 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers are unfolding like a malevolent clockwork, like a bad dream in which events cannot progress any way except toward their preordained, tragic outcome -- in short like history. "They are turning this place into a mousetrap," Olegario Santana thinks as he returns to the school of Our Lady of Iquique, perhaps for the last time -- he tries to persuade Gregoria Becerra to leave the school but she is steadfast in her commitment to the strike.
This impending sense of doom requires that Rivera Letelier move his narration to the past tense. Throughout the book the narrative present tense has been dominant, and the stories being told have focused on individuals, makers of free decisions within the context of the history which is the framework of the book. Here the story is the history, the concrete events of the past, where free choice is no longer relevant, and the events are related in the past tense. (And still there is a quick switch to the present tense when Olegario Santana is pleading with Gregoria Becerra to leave, when she is deciding freely to stand by the union; and somehow this is not confusing to the reader, somehow it flows perfectly.) The last words of the chapter have General Silva Renard making his fateful decision:
At this point, the general was convinced that the situation was no longer maintainable -- «in order not to compromise the prestige and honor of the authorities, of the security forces, I was faced with the necessity of checking the rebellion before the end of the day» is how he put it in his journal. Finally, he made the decision. Rising up on his steed, the sun's rays shining off his military harness, he crossed himself lightly. He raised his hand to give the order to fire.
(It is extremely disconcerting to be reading this story while the unions in Madison are occupying the state capitol and threatening a general strike. Not that I expect governor Walker to call out the state militia and fire on the protestors, although such things have happened in our history as well as in Chile's -- but this book is a sad reminder of the lengths to which those in power will go, have gone, to maintain their power.)
This chapter also features the blind poet, Rosario Calderón, who has made occasional appearances throughout the book reciting popular poetry to the strikers. He is here declaiming what I take to be another verse of his namesake's poem commemorating the massacre:
Hoy por hambre acosado
esta región abandono,
me voy sin fuerza, ni abono,
viejo, pobre y explotado,
dejo el trabajo pesado
del combo, chuzo y la lampa
y esa maldita rampa
donde caà deshojada,
soy la flor negra y callada
que nace y muere en la pampa
Pursued by hunger
I leave this place,
powerless, penniless,
an old man, broken down and poor,
I leave this oppressive work,
this heavy pair, my shovel and my bucket,
this damned mine shaft
I fell down, broken;
I am the dark and silent flower
which grows and dies in the pampa.
Chilean blogger Walterio2 has posted Calderón's verses and a lot of other pampino poetry: La pampa es silente.
↻...done
Ellen and Sylvia gave me a lovely jigsaw puzzle for Valentine's Day -- an unusual puzzle in that the edges were the hardest part to assemble. Most puzzles, I do the edge first, then fill in the middle; with this one, I had to start with some of the easy-to-recognize bits in the middle and work outward. The puzzle sat for a week or more with everything complete except for the edges (and, well, except for that annoyingly lost piece in the middle there)... You can click the photo to see a few in-progress pics.
posted morning of March 5th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Puzzles
Tuesday, March first, 2011
When I got to Hoboken this evening, the sun was low in the sky, and when my train pulled out of the station it was just touching the horizon. By the time I got off the train in South Orange a half an hour later, it was nearly dark. In between I was treated to one of the loveliest sunsets I can remember seeing around here.
And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata†that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 “Lacrimi si Sfinti,†the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as “God’s open wound.â€
The current New Yorker prints an excerpt of David Foster Wallace's forthcoming The Pale King. It's shocking, beautiful, engaging; it "allows the reader to leap over the wall of self". You can also listen to Wallace reading this fragment, ten years ago, in a recording preserved at The Lannan Foundation.
And more! George Lazenby of 424 W 23rd St, NY 10011—2157 (an address to conjure with!) has a recording of Sunday, February 6th's edition of Endnotes on BBC radio; Geoff Ward presents his research into the life and work of Wallace.
I'm thinking of Santana as the physical presence of Rivera Letelier in the story, for a few reasons. He was the first character introduced; he is a loner, quiet and reserved in his relations with the others, which strikes me as the proper deportment for the author; he is older than the others (Rivera Letelier was in his early 50's when he wrote this book, which I believe is roughly Santana's age -- quite old for someone in his extremely hazardous profession) and is the most skeptical about the odds of their strike having a positive outcome, the first to express worries about the military presence building up in Iquique.
There has been almost remarkably little narrative foreboding vis-a-vis the impending massacre. The book's first half has been about the workers and their friendships, about the blossoming love between Idilio and Liria MarÃa, and about the pampino community's high hopes for a proletarian victory and a new order. The only overt foreshadowings I have noticed that were not explicitly in Santana's voice were in Chapter 7, where it is mentioned that the provincial governor has asked Santiago for military reinforcements "without hope that the unrest will be resolved", and now in Chapter 10, where new reinforcements are arriving from Arica and the situation is "turning ugly."
As long as I'm thinking about group reads, I ought to mention the read of Life: a User's Manual recently begun at Conversational Reading. With lots of helpful resources for understanding Perec and Oulipo. From the first week, an excellent review by Chad Post.
Olegario Santana (the calichero with the 
