Liberty is not a woman walking the streets, she is not sitting on a bench waiting for an invitation to dinner, to come sleep in our bed for the rest of her life.
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Writing Projects
Posts about Writing Projects
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.
Sinking into the warm black pillow of night. I’m dreaming
Masks, new faces, costumes I will wear
Internally, so I won’t know myself,
My face, my clean white tablet lies
There on the pillow looking up at me.
So paint! Draw crazy patterns on your cheeks;
Sculpt horns and wild protuberances, scars
Where your clean virgin skin is lying smooth.
Add blemishes and warts around your mouth,
Sprout tufts of wiry hair beside your nose --
just let yourself go,
make a May Day parade
of masks:
We’ll set them up
For all to see
We’ll let you know
Which ones will work,
Which ones will trick you out obscenely sinister unrecognized and sneaking stealthy sliding past
the doorways of your ego lurking dark around the alleys of your childhood memories;
And when I've gone to sleep I’ll see
My costumed armies waiting
And the desolation staging
Where they play.
posted morning of May 11th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Dreams
A story idea (or, well, a character idea -- nothing happening in the story, yet) that developed in China as I interacted with vendors at the Shanghai textile market. I was not really there to buy anything, just keeping Ellen and Sylvia company in their hunt for silk...
So the idea is, there's this character, a sexually/interpersonally-frustrated American businessman who spends time in China working for his company. Not really sure of the details of this, possibly I would model him on a British expatriate we met in Suzhou who had lived there for several years doing marketing for a British telecommunications firm. I think the character's name is Morris Babel, just because I was reading 100 Years of Solitude recently and thinking what a great character name that would be, and it seems to work for this character. Babel's business does not involve textiles but he develops the kink of hanging around the fabric and clothing markets having people sell to him -- the salespeople, who are generally attractive young women, make eye contact, greet him, ask him to look at their wares, and if he pauses to take a look, aggressively market the merchandise, pulling him in and connecting with him, or creating the appearance of a connection. Babel finds this addictive and returns daily to the markets, buying clothing and fabric and trinkets he does not have any use for in exchange for this experience of feeling wanted.
It seemed to me at the market like this form of direct personal marketing was the primitive form of the advertising industry I have been exposed to all my life in America, probably (almost certainly) more effective on a per-exposure basis than mass media advertising but of course much less efficient in terms of money, since labor is involved in each exposure.
posted morning of April 24th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Projects
10And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. 11And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.
12And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
13And, behold, the lord stood above it, and said, I am the lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;
14And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
15And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
16And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the lord is in this place; and I knew it not. 17And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. 18And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. 19And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.
-- Genesis 28 (kjv)
—Está bien, Prudencio —le dijo—. Nos iremos de este pueblo, lo más lejos que podamos, y no regresaremos jamás. Ahora vete tranquilo.
And a reward, for reading all that text: Here is Alison Kraus singing about (another) Jacob's Dream.
* I am not sure what this means. Gregory Rabassa renders it literally in his translation, "and they succeeded"; but it does not mean anything in English. I am leaving it out of my translation. My best guess is that it means some of the travellers *did* die of exhaustion; but no mention of this is made elsewhere, and it seems like it would be a strange thing to throw in with no specifics. ... Got it! (Maybe) -- I think I am misreading this. I wanted "todos estaban dispuestos a morirse de viejos" to mean, "they were ready to drop dead of exhaustion" so I ignored the meaning of the words; viejos is old age, not exhaustion. So estaban dispuestos means "they were ready/prepared" in the sense of what they were planning to do, not what they were about to do -- they meant to die of old age, not to die on the journey. "(and they succeeded)" -- i.e. they did die of old age, years later, not on the journey. I think Rabassa's translation is very unclear. I modified my translation above.
Update: Some further thinking about Jacob (and Macondo) here.
Si sólo fuese el grito
del agua,
o el rodar de una piedra
que no encuentro acomodo
a la orilla del llanto.
Si sólo fuese
la herida corrosiva
de los pasos sin nombre
en los dÃas que mueren,
o la processión lenta de las horas
(centinelas del miedo).
Si sólo fuese el puñado de hierba
lo que cubre a la sangre,
aventada al olvido,
para poder decir:
es el final.
Too Late
If only it were just the scream
the water's scream,
the restless turning of a stone
which finds no spot to nestle
by the banks of the storm.
If only it were just
the wound, corrosive wound,
that nameless passage,
flow of dead time;
the soft procession of the hours
(sentinels of fear).
If only that bundle of herbs,
the ones we use to bind our wounds,
could be scattered to oblivion,
that we might say:
it is over.
I'm torn here between the beauty of the language and imagery, and a fear that I'm not really understanding the poem, am misreading and mistranslating... A more literal translation of the title is "The Juvenile Offender" -- I could not make any sense of that so I seized on an alternate meaning of "delinquent" in English, but I really have no idea if that works in Spanish.
Cárdenas Peña seems like a good poet for Valentine's Day as he is just about as Romantic as they come. Wikipædia says that he was "infatuated with beauty, with masculine beauty; he passed his thankless days in Platonic admiration of young men's bodies. The contemplation of physical beauty, the slow and sensuous writing of his poetry, the dialogues which he carried out with himself in cheap hotels and in the beds of the poorhouse -- perhaps these were the three fundamental activities of his life."
Another animal that migrated across the Bering land bridge and east and south throughout the Americas and eventually down as far as Chile: the polyommatus butterfly. Dr. Naomi Pierce of Harvard et al. have vindicated Nabokov's hypothesis regarding the introduction of this genus of butterfly to the Americas, as Carl Zimmer reports today for the NY Times. The slideshow attached to the article has to be seen to be believed.
Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)
At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --
Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow.
The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.
Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side.
Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterflyâ€, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.*
As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.
So he thought; and that is what he did.
(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.)
I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo habÃa llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for...
* One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.
Here is the state of play â…“ of the way into Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, as the striking workers, having marched from Alto de San Antonio to Iquique, settle into their quarters at the Escuela Santa MarÃa* to wait for the mining companies' response to their demands:
Barretero is a worker at the mine who digs trenches.
Carretero is a mechanic who works on the carts used for hauling caliche, the nitrate ore.
Herramentero is (at a guess) a blacksmith.
Calichero is a mine-worker; I think it is a generic term covering anyone who works at the nitrate mines. There are several words derived from caliche that occur quite frequently in the text.
Particular is one of the jobs in the nitrate fields; I think it might refer to someone who works with explosives.
Derripiador is one of the jobs involved in processing nitrate ore.
Patizorro is (I think) another term for particular.
Perforista: another term for barretero.
Some of this stuff is pretty specific to nitrate mining in Chile, I'm not sure how it could be brought over cleanly into English. Album Desierto has a great glossary of salitrera terminology.
*It is difficult reading (mostly in the present tense) about how excited the striking workers are, how happy and hopeful they are in the face of their hardships, when you know how the history is going to end up.
**At one point Gregoria Becerra says her daughter "does not need any idilios"; Idilio Montañez' name means "love affair".
Teresa's Christmas post is very much worth checking out: Luke 2, 1-14 in a plethora of different translations. Read about Mary's revelation in Dutch, Portuguese, Lowland Scots, Greek, Slavonic, various Englishes...
posted afternoon of December 27th, 2010: 1 response ➳ More posts about The Bible
Many thanks to commenter Mariano on last year's Hypallage post for his valuable information about the image from Milton that Borges references in his dedication of El hacedor to Lugones. Mariano points out that beyond the fact that "las lámparas estudiosas" is clearly not quoting the "bright officious lamps" of Paradise Lost, book Ⅸ, there is not even any reference to this passage; rather, we have a quote from Milton's Areopagitica, a tract he wrote for Parliament in opposition to censorship.
Behold now this vast City: a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer'd Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea's wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.
So, well, this means that both Boyer's translation and Hurley's have problems. Boyer is correct in calling the phrase "the hypallage of Milton" (though I would like "Milton's hypallage" better) -- Hurley's "a Miltonian displacement of adjectives" is clumsy and does not communicate Borges' intent. And Hurley has "scholarly lamps", which undoes the quotation. But Boyer quotes the wrong passage of Milton! That spoils the image. The image from Areopagitica makes complete sense as a part Borges' dedication, while the image from Paradise Lost seemed pretty out of keeping with the context.
...Reinventing the wheel dept. -- I see Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Actiwrote about this last November, saying "as others have noted" -- guess it's not a new piece of knowledge. Nice to have on hand though.
posted evening of December 7th, 2010: 1 response ➳ More posts about The Maker
I'm slightly surprised at (or surprised that I am surprised at) the reverent picture Rivera Letelier paints of the Christ of Elqui. I think my expectation going in was that he would be a Quixote figure; and there is that quality, a comedy of errors aspect to his mission in the desert.* But beyond that, his reverence is treated very respectfully, painted with a sincere, complex brush. Here is part of a sermon to the striking workers:
His arms open forming a crucifix, the intense dark of his eyes flaring up, he spoke to convince his congregation that the desert is
the place where one feels oneself most absolutely in the presence of the Eternal Father: the most perfect spot for speaking with Him.
— And it is not for nothing; as the Holy Bible tells us, even Christ himself spent forty days in the desert before he came out to preach his good news. And even so, O my brothers: not everything in this world is evil. You, sirs, have something which is worth more than gold and silver put together. The silence of the desert. The purest, finest silence anywhere on the planet; thus the most conducive for each one of you, to finding his own soul, the most suitable for listening to his God, for hearing the voice of the Eternal Father.
* (This expectation may also have been shaped by the focus of my attention while I was reading and translating the first chapter, which does have a sort of broadly comic or slapstick tragic feel to it.)
This is sort of an updated take on Borges' "Los teólogos" I think -- a man is reading and blogging about a book which he's reading in a language not his own (one not available in translation); he manages to create a controversy or at least a bit of publicity around blasphemy in the text which is, however, not actually present in the source material -- it is the product of a fundamental misreading on his part, but nevertheless the controversy necessarily involves the original author of the piece, a contemporary of the blogger's who is not seeking the spotlight. This publicity becomes the author's route to fame or celebrity -- a different fame than he would have had in mind, while the (mis-)translator is of course pretty much ignored in the press and ultimately forgotten by history.
At the Chronicle for Higher Education, Timothy Beal meditates on contradictions in the Bible, with reference to "The Grand Inquisitor" and to Blind Willie Johnson. (Thanks for the link, Doug!)
Some text! Let's look at two longish quotes.
settle into their quarters at the Escuela Santa MarÃa* to wait for the mining companies' response to their demands:
Many thanks to commenter Mariano on last year's 
