READIN: Pairing off

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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.

🦋 Pairing off

The only real thing that exists at this moment on earth is our being here together...

I'm lingering around the middle of The Stone Raft a bit. I was a bit surprised at Joana's revelation, and it prompted me to think of the book as pretty strongly feminist in tone; but now, following close on that, she has paired off with José; Maria has been introduced and has paired off with Joaquim, and with that any feminism in the book seems (for now) much more muted, I mean to say it seems like a romance in a more familiar model.

Joachim is self-centered and needy; if the book's aim is to show him growing into a full human being by accepting love from a woman, well, it will still be a very good book but I will be disappointed. (I speculate about how I will feel about the book when I'm done reading it -- obviously I can't know.) A romance can be a very satisfactory read of course. But the first half of this book made it seem like it was going to be much more than that; hopefully Saramago is not headed where I am assuming he is.

posted evening of Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
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What's of interest:

➪	LanguageHat links (with amusing commentary) to a newly-online edition of Pound's anthology Des Imagistes.
➪	Saramago notes that María Kodama (Borges' widow, who has been the subject of some controversy lately) is in Portugal for the dedication of a monument to Borges in the Jardim do Arco do Cego.
➪	Adam Kotsko incisively points out the failures of A.O. Scott's review of Che.

(Other links of interest at my Google+ page. It's recommend ed!)

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🦋 Pairing off

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