READIN: Speaking in Tongues

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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.

🦋 Speaking in Tongues

I am a comic novelist, idiot-savant of the humanities; lecturing is outside my remit.

Hendrik Hertzberg alerted me today to the publication of Zadie Smith's article "Speaking in Tongues" in the current NY Review of Books. It's adapted from a lecture she gave at the NYPL's "NYPL Live" series in December; you can download a recording of the lecture from the series page. Smith speaks very eloquently of Pygmalion and of Dreams from My Father, of Obama's "story of a genuinely many-voiced man".

We'll see if Obama's lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice "I love my country" while saying with another voice "It is a country, like other countries." I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.

posted evening of Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
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What's of interest:

➪	Adam Roberts of The Valve links to an exciting new project: Roger Greenawalt and David Barratt are engaged in recording the complete works of The Beatles on ukulele, each song with a different guest singer.
➪	Feeling short on sparkly rainbows and magic unicorns? Time to Cornify your site! (h/t Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
➪	Robyn Hitchcock talks briefly to the Guardian about what tracks he's been listening to on his iPod. "This record's mood is almost a celebration of things not working out."

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

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🦋 Speaking in Tongues

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