Friday, February 28, 2014

Splash du Jour: Friday

I want to post this clip because I think it is really liberating, what one of my favourite writers [Andre Dubus III]  has to say, about writing.
See, I always doubt that I am a writer. The only place I am "published", is on my own blogpage. But I will never forget what Billy Collins did for me, as a poet. He is a poet. Many of you will be familiar with him. But when I myself discovered Billy Collins the experience unleashed for me, my own inner poet. He took away the fear of writing poetry. And he made me realize that anything worth communicating or expressing, thought-wise, and if felt deeply, stretched out into lines and stanzas, could be a potential poem.
And a similar thing has happened for me in my discovery of Andre Dubus III, with respect to prose writing in general. It's not about perfection, nor is it about being published. It's about the act itself.
Take the less-than-two-minutes to watch this clip -- perhaps it will invigorate you also. I just love what he says at the very end, and you have to listen closely to catch it: "You're already a writer."



Have a great Friday!
*****

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Books of February

In the past few weeks -- I've been reading some truly terrific books and just want to drop in here to recommend each of them to my Puddlefriends. Once again, I have umm… no negative things to say about my last three books. I can't help it! I just pick good books, I guess!

First, a memoir called Townie, by Andre Dubus III.
He's become a favourite author of mine, and I just wanted to find out a bit more about his actual life. Wow. This memoir is as exciting and interesting as any book of fiction, I honestly could not put the thing down. In a nutshell, Dubus grew up in and around Haverill, Massachusetts -- a mill town, rough and tumble. His fun-loving, party-hosting bohemian parents separated when Andre was young, leaving his mother to tend with the child-raising duties. The real challenge for Andre was in coming to terms with the sheer amount of times he was getting beaten up at school and on the streets. It became a source of constant frustration for him. Then his sister gets raped. Andre longs for vengeance. And one day, his brother is so badly beaten up by a town thug, that Andre can't take it anymore. He decides that the only way to win is to fight back, and he develops a strict, almost insane regimen of working out in his basement. Pushing weights -- bulking up to take on the world. Or at least this particular part of Massachussetts. Fighting becomes a lifestyle, and he is soon on the delivering end of the punches. He describes in vivid detail how a life of violence can overtake the inner life of reasoning. Fighting becomes an addiction for him. But at his core, fighting was always about righting a wrong. The problem is, the better he became at brawling, the more he became an instigator. And all the while, he was denying himself the freedom of a better means of expression. Namely, writing.
The book delineates the lifelong process of how writing became Dubus's new religion. It is a pitch-perfect look at how one man exchanged his skill at putting fists to faces for putting pen to paper.


Then I read another writer that can do no wrong for me. Sarah Waters. Tipping The Velvet. Her first novel, and yet, the last of hers I read. I've read them all now, in pretty much reverse order. Good news though, if you find yourself in a similar predicament. She will have a new one coming out this year, and you can see it, HERE.
This thing is saucy. A critic from The Daily Telegraph called Sarah Waters "a kind of feminist Dickens" but, considering that the title itself is a euphemism referring to the act of oral sex between two women [as in, with no else in the room]… hmmm, I think her similarity to Dickens ends pretty much before the first page. It's set in Victorian England, but other than that, this is nothing like Martin Chuzzlewit! Young Nancy Astley leaves her small-town life as an oyster-shucker [nope, no typos there] to take up with Kitty Butler, a singer-entertainer who impersonates men. Nancy is fascinated with Kitty, and meets her backstage. The admiration is mutual, and they become a team, traveling the music halls of the day and falling madly in love with each other. The amalgamation is short-lived though, due to Kitty's reticence at the lifestyle involved. Remember, this is Victorian England… no stereo system anywhere is playing Melissa Etheridge quite yet! I find that the best books are always the hardest to summarize in a review, because too much can be given away, about the story. Suffice it to say, Waters does succeed at showing us in Tipping The Velvet, that the truest things about love do, at times, transcend gender.
A ripping good book.


I then moved forward to the Civil War era, with All Other Nights, by Dara Horn. 

Jacob Rappaport, a Jew, enlists as a recruit in the Union Army to escape an arranged marriage orchestrated by his father. Basically, he runs away from home, and is assigned a mission to assassinate his own uncle [on the Southern side] who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. His success takes him to a further mission, in which he falls in love with the very woman, a spy, whom he has been commissioned to betray. This meticulously researched and exquisitely written story is an examination of the limits of loyalty. Will Jacob ultimately serve the cause, a nation that is itself divided in its interests, or will he respond to the person that brings the truest tear to his eye. We often throw that phrase about: Blood is thicker than water. But this book answers a deeper question: Is love thicker than ideology?
I can think of worse ways to spend a February than in the presence of three great books, such as these.

*****

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Good-looking people, they got no spine; their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we're smarter. The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.
-- Philip Seymour-Hoffman --


Have a great Thursday!
*****

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
-- John Steinbeck, Cannery Row --


Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Monday, February 24, 2014

Splash du Jour: Monday

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.
-- Dara Horn, The World To Come --


Have a great Monday!
*****

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Smile: A Vignette

Smile

    The backseat of his father’s Audi. Bryant, resting his head on the window watches the ditch receding and advancing against the shadow thrown from the afternoon sun. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor in his headphones. Both things mesmerize him. Drifting off now and then, but wildly conscious, he hears his teacher Adamo Botzio warning him of the perils of listening to someone else play the piece you yourself are supposed to master.
    “A virtuoso never mimics, Bryant.”
    True, he thinks, and yet, as first violin, he will not be reading sheet music on that evening. He can think of worse criticisms among an audience in the mezzanine than “He sounded very much like Julia Fischer.” He knows he needs to feel this piece. And the way she plays this – God, it’s a miracle along the lines of how shadows work. The way the tree line bounces in, steps out – the car keeping a straight steady line all the while. A signpost whips past his forehead, close and too quick to read, the words on it, Denver 30 Miles. It jars Bryant from his reverie and he turns to see his father hammer his fist on the steering wheel. Bryant kills the volume on his iPod.

    “Jesus Liz. Did it at any time occur to you that we were in a cemetery? A cemetery! A funeral! “
    The hum of the four Pirellis.

    The newspapers were calling Bryant a child prodigy four years ago, when he was eleven. At each performance hardened skeptics experienced a sort of conversion. A newfound belief in the divine. Brahms, Dvorak, Glazunov – Bryant Zukis could play anything from these composers within a week’s notice, and a rumor was amok that detractors were deliberately devising ways to throw him off his game. Botzio had recently secured him a guest performance as first violin with the Denver Symphony Orchestra. The date was set, and Bryant was preparing, but today a storm brewing three feet in front of him captured his attention. He leaned closer.

    “Do you have any idea how important the son of the man in that casket is? No, let me speak, Liz.” His father raised his right hand to stifle something Bryant’s mother was about to say. “He is my only chance at a promotion in the company. And what an honor to be a pallbearer. I nearly died myself when they asked me. But why? Why, when we are about to lower the guy into his eternal darkness… why would you, my wife, raise your camera, and say ‘Smile?’”
    Bryant’s mother observed the outside landscape, the shadows leaping.

    “Look. I said it many times now. I’m sorry.” She turned to face him. “I don’t know. I forgot myself. You all looked so handsome. Something out of habit. I said smile. I’m sorry. I knew instantly how wrong it was. A faux pas. Call it a momentary lapse of reason.”


    “Well, I’m going to call it stupid if you really want to know!” He passed a Corvette doing 90. “And you know what? It’s not the first time.”
    Bryant could see that his mother’s head sloped forward. She was looking down at her hands. He imagined tears, and did not want to see them.
    His father, not quite done, continued – “It’s like sometimes I wonder if you know much about social etiquette, Liz. The bigger world out there. I’m in meetings, day in and day out. You’ve got to be on your toes. Christ, the people I roll with, their wives have to be on their toes, too. It’s a part of it. You know what would happen to me at the firm if I walked around telling people to smile while they’re lowering their fathers into a grave? I’d be finished. It’s stupid what you did.”

    Bryant moved closer, and as he did so, he turned Julia Fischer full throttle, slipping the headphones from his ears to appear as though he heard none of the preceding one-sided banter. He tapped his father’s shoulder.

    “Dad, I wasn’t going to really say anything about this, but – remember my last recital, the one at Hamden Hall?”
    “I do son. You were exquisite.”
    “Yeah. At the intermission, me and Mr. Botzio stepped outside the stage door to get some fresh air and… and…”
    “And what, Bryant? What?”
    “Well – it’s just that, we both heard something that sounded like rain, and we turned to see you taking a leak on the back tire of someone’s Mercedes in the parking garage. Seriously dad, I didn’t mind so much, but Botzio, he’s on the committee of hiring for full-time orchestra, and like… what your family is like, matters.”
    Pirellis. God, the hum they can work up.

    “Well, for frig sakes, why doesn’t someone install a few more bathrooms in that place? The lineup for the urinals was a dozen men deep!”
    But by then the headphones were on, the volume on nine.
    Bryant sat back to watch the shadows playing their afternoon games, catching a certain slant of sunlight in the passenger mirror. Illuminating his mother’s smile.


.-- © Ciprianowords, Inc. 2014 --
*****

Friday, February 21, 2014

Splash du Jour: Friday

My son Kennedy just wanted to send out Congratulations to the Canadian Women's Olympic Hockey Team for their victory in Sochi yesterday over our arch rivals and general ne'er do wells -- the Americans! And today it's up to the men to do the same! Against a similar bunch of no-goodniks! Kennedy's prediction is that the score will be… 3 - 1. Obviously, we will win. 
GO CANADA GO!

Have a great Friday!
*****

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Dave Letterman's
Top Ten Signs You Have A Special Chicken


10. Lays eggs and bacon.
9. Clucks in five languages.
8. Holds a Bachelor's degree in hotel management.
7. Struck down law defining marriage as between a rooster and a hen.
6. Knew when to invest in Apple and when to get the hell out.
5. Comes with soup, salad and choice of potato (no, I'm sorry, that's the sign you're having the chicken special).
4. The chicken is on the short list to replace Alex Trebek.
3. Can scientifically prove the egg came first.
2. Regularly lays ping pong balls with winning Lotto numbers.
1. Is only member of its family not currently a McNugget.


Have a great Thursday!
*****

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Two students decide to go skiing for the weekend, and are having such a good time they decide to blow off the exam that they have scheduled for Monday morning in order to get some final runs in before they head back to school. They decide to tell the prof that they got a flat tire and therefore deserve to take the exam at a rescheduled time.
Hearing the story, the professor agrees that it really was just bad luck, and of course they can take the exam later. At the appointed time, the prof greets them and places them in two separate rooms to take the exam.
The few questions on the first page are worth a minor 10% of the overall grade, and are quite easy. Each student grows progressively confident as they take the test, sure that they have gotten away with fooling the professor. However, when they turn to the second page they discover that they really haven't.
The only question on the page, worth 90% of the exam, reads: "Which tire?"


Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Friday, February 14, 2014

Splash du Jour: Friday


A Time To Sing

To me, the saddest thing to hear
Are tales of those sorry folks
Who’ve spent their busy lives in fear
Of showing love when needed most.

Too late, too late their praises came
With no one left to trust
Or hear while living, the words aflame
That fell on ears of dust.

But not so with you my love...
I’ll not wait until from heaven’s porch
You squint, and try from up above
To find a flare from my heart’s torch.

No, today a song comes from my pen
For I can’t but wonder how
A thousand sung in sweetness then
Could equal one sung now.

 

-- © Ciprianowords, Inc. 2006 --

Have a great Valentine's Day!
*****

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Splash du Jour: Wednesday


Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.
-- Dave Eggers --


Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Splash du Jour: Tuesday


And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one has been underneath all along, and writing -- even writing badly -- had peeled  away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.
-- Andre Dubus III, Townie: A Memoir --


Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Monday, February 10, 2014

Splash du Jour: Monday

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged --


Have a great Monday!
*****

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Philip Seymour-Hoffman

It's been a week now since my favourite Hollywood actor has died, and so I feel I should say something about it. I think it will be a really long time, if ever, before we will see an actor as amazing as Philip Seymour-Hoffman. His death is a tragedy not only in the loss itself, but in the way in which it happened. I guess it will always remain a mystery to those of us who lead our normal day-to-day lives, the normal work world where you just make enough money to get by -- a mystery as to why so many celebrities seem to fall into the web of addictions that can lead to the very ending of their life. For me, it just highlights the fact that there must be voids in all of us that go beyond the realm of [seemingly] endless opportunity to fix them through success or money. I've spent a lot of the weekend watching old clips of Seymour-Hoffman, and watching interviews. When he accepted the Oscar for his lead role in Capote, Hoffman reserved the highest praise for his mother, who single-handedly raised him and his three siblings. It just seemed so poignant to me. Why does a person need to leave such a stage amid the accolades of your peers -- at the pinnacle of your career -- and from there, lock yourself away in a bathroom, with heroin? It's a mystery deeper than the plot of any movie.
I will miss him on the screen. He always seemed to me to be the type of person I would have loved to have known as a friend. In this clip [below] I agree with David Edelstein when he suggests that Hoffman's special gift was his "anti-vanity." The way in which he "…homed in on the grotesque. He thought you'd have more empathy for people who were reprehensible, because deep down we all know how flawed we are."
What a loss. What a sad and tragic loss.

Friday, February 07, 2014

Splash du Jour: Friday

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative." He paused to reflect. "However," he continued, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah. Right."


Have a great Friday!
*****

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Welcome To The Monkey House

Having just finished this ancient book of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, I wonder why I waited half a century to ever read him! This book was awesome.
Welcome To The Monkey House was originally published in 1968, but the 25 stories within it take place well… all over the place, time-wise. Some take place in the far-distant future, like the year 2158, etc. And in these futuristic psuedo-sci-fi stories, Vonnegut is forever poking fun at what a botched up mess we make of technology. It's hilarious -- but also, thought-provoking.
Truthfully, I am not a big fan of short story collections. So, for me to say that I actually enjoyed each and every one of these is really something. 

Here is a little experiment I do when I finish a book of short stories. I look at the Table of Contents and review each title in my mind, recalling what each story was about. If most of them are a blur, or forgotten entirely, then I conclude the following: 
Either a) I am not a very attentive reader, or b) the stories were not very good.
With Welcome To The Monkey House I can look at all the titles and basically regurgitate a synopsis of each story in my mind. In other words, they were meaningful and memorable. And even fun.

The author once listed 8 points that he himself thought were important in the writing of short stories:
1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4) Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5) Start as close to the end as possible.
6) Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.


I think he succeeds in his stated goals with this book. Vonnegut was known to "rate" his own books -- and he was quite impartial -- some of them he awarded himself only a "D". 

He considered Welcome To The Monkey House a "B -".
I thought is was more like an "A".
At any rate, the experience made me want to read the only two he awarded an "A+" to: Slaughter-House 5, and Cat's Cradle.
How about you? What's your favourite Vonnegut book? Am I the last kid on the block to be reading this guy's work?

*****

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Have a great Thursday!
*****

Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Splash du Jour: Tuesday


Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
-- Kurt Vonnegut --


Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Monday, February 03, 2014

How I Chose The Winning Team

So last night I sat down to watch the Super Bowl, along with half the world. Thing is, I'm virtually NFL-illiterate, really. 
I didn't even know who was playing until watching the pre-game show. In all seriousness, I think my cat knows more about football than I do. But I figured I'd pretend I'm a football fan and see what happens.
Thing is, you've got to cheer for someone, right? I mean -- what's the point of even watching if you don't want one of the teams to win? 

So there I was… hmmm… Seattle or Denver? What's more important, rock-solid defense, or rock-solid offense? 
Who would Jesus cheer for, I wondered.
But then it hit me. Seattle is the birthplace of Starbucks! 

And I practically live at Starbucks.
So, I decided to cheer for Starbucks. Seattle would be my team.
I settled in with a bag of potato chips and a beer and was all like "Go Starhawks!"
But then another thought struck me.
I really love a good denver sandwich -- I mean, who doesn't, right?
So now I was all confused again, my loyalty to Seattle faltering a bit. I've got to admit, there are times when I might even trade my grande latte for a damn fine denver sandwich!
I barely had time to take a few sips of beer after the coin toss when I looked up to see that Starbucks was already winning the game by two points, twelve seconds in.
So, it was a no-brainer. I became an avid Seattle fan. And wow, they really kicked butt from there on in.
The moral of this story? Sometimes you've gotta just go with your initial gut-feelings.

*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

Have a great Monday!
*****

Sunday, February 02, 2014

Why Does The World Exist?

I finished this book, not surprisingly, at a Starbucks. As I rose from the table and put my coat on a lady asked me "So what's the answer?" I looked at her as if I'd just fallen off the cabbage truck. But there was the book still on the table and she was pointing at the cover. "Oh," I said "There really is no answer." She laughed and sat down in my vacated chair, saying "Of course there isn't. That's quite the question."
And she's right. There isn't. And it is.
If you approach Jim Holt's Why Does The World Exist? expecting to find some airtight conclusion on the last page, you're reading it for the wrong reason. The truth is, the answer is indeed impossible, but this makes the question itself all the more relevant. At least this is the opinion of the author. We are a curious species, and Jim Holt must have surely been a cat in a former life, because he is tenacious at clawing his way toward a better understanding of why there is something, rather than nothing. That is the fundamental question asked at every level of this book: 

Why is there something rather than nothing?
Wouldn't it be simpler or more logical for the universe to simply not exist? Isn't "nothingness" a more likely default position than what we know to be the case -- that there is not only "something" but SO MUCH of something, that it staggers the mind?
Holt, a philosopher in his own right, takes us on a thoroughly unbiased journey through the history of ideas on this very subject of existence. He is well-versed and well-researched, and personally interviews a wide range of experts on the topic. Scientists, theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists -- theists to non-theists -- everyone sort of has their say in the book. At one point it is estimated that we are perhaps a century or even two centuries away from really being able to elucidate the "how" aspect of the universe. And even then, the "why" question will probably still exist, unanswered. Really, there is that humbling sense that mankind, given all of our current knowledge, is yet in the infancy stages of understanding why anything is "here" in the first place. Just as vital pieces of the puzzle seem to be fitted into place and expressed in axioms or laws, the very existence of those laws must also be explained, as to their own origins. Vis a vis, even if "God" were posited as the source of these [seemingly] natural laws of nature, [a view the author, not to mention me as a reader, would interpret as being defeatist] well then -- what is the source of "God"?
This is not to give the impression that we are mired in gobbledegook, theory-wise, and should just give up the pursuit. There is definite progress being made, in much the same way as progress has been made in the field of chemistry -- in which, prior to the discovery of the Periodic Table the ancient chemical theory of Thales held sway, based on water alone.
Holt is hopeful that each generation will gain a better understanding of this problem of the fundamental nature of existence. Perhaps our great-great grandchildren [not mine, but yours, by the way…] will be able to look up at the night sky and, as the stars twinkle above, have a greater science-based understanding of why everything is as it is, than we do. In the meantime, it seems to me that the best we virtual Neanderthals can do is read great books like this, and continue to wonder. This book is a testament to the fact that greater minds than the average stunned-faced guy at a Starbucks near you [struggling to find the second armhole of his jacket] are hard at work -- trying to come up with improved theories to apply to the Unanswerable Question.

*****

Saturday, February 01, 2014

Joe! He's Back In Town!

As some of you may already know, when a guitar legend comes to town -- I just have to be there! So today I bundled up and made my way down to the NAC box office and gladly dropped $200 on the next Joe Bonamassa concert. 
My last "guitar-geek" concert was back in October, when I saw another Joe [Satriani], which was fabulous.
But I think I am even more excited about Bonamassa. The guy is sort of a prodigy -- it's like he was born playing guitar. His style is… I don't know… upscale blues, really. So this is a concert I eagerly anticipate. The guy is fantastic.
Other than this, well -- I read a lot of old Kurt Vonnegut stories today, my first outing into the world of Vonnegut, and I really liked these old gems, written back in the 1950's and '60's. He is to the world of short story, what Bonamassa is to the world of guitar. A virtuoso.
Here is a clip taken by yours truly, at the last Bonamassa concert I was at, in 2011.