Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!
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It's Just Wrong!

I consider myself to be a progressive thinker.
The only thing "Stone Age" about me is that I work like a Neanderthal all day, at my job!
Aside from that, hey... I'm changing with the times.
I'm as hip as the next guy!
I know that my readers here at Bookpuddle are the same. We're a savvy bunch.
And yet, I feel that I must speak out about a disturbing trend I am seeing in the world of books.
Children's books, to be specific.
I'm all for pushing the envelope, but seriously, I think things in this genre are getting a bit racy.
Quite frankly, if I were apparent, I mean -- a PARENT, I'd be worried.
Have you seen some of the new titles out there, for kids?
It's just wrong, I'm sorry!
If you want an example of what I'm talking about, have a look at --> THIS.
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning towards sunlight.
-- Rita Rudner --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Bernie Madoff's wife is mad at Bernie. She said, "I may not wait that 150 years for you to get out. I may be long gone." To make matters worse, Bernie's new wife, Chuck, is also mad at him.
-- David Letterman --

Have a great Wednesday!

Tilt it Sideways!

<-- No, this is NOT a blog about George Clooney!
I'm halfway through reading John Irving's [1981] novel The Hotel New Hampshire.
My enjoyment of it is no surprise to me.
Just tonight I have been wondering though, why it is I like the novels of John Irving, as much as I do.
Because truly, he is one of my favorite authors. And yet, at times, he does things that I would not tolerate in any other novelist. I refer to his dwelling on, and [in my opinion] over-emphasizing of certain quirky traits in his [already quirky-enough] characters.
Already in New Hampshire, Irving has had the protagonist Win Berry say "Jesus God" enough times that I am expecting the Lord Himself to return to Earth way ahead of schedule!
It's driving me CRAZY!
Yet I love John Irving.
I just love how he writes.
I enter fully into the nutty... storyness of his [nutty] stories!

This is the sixth of his novels I have read, and I have loved them all. But when I say "love" I mean it in the sense that at times he pisses me off. He gets too [what is the word?] caricaturish!
As in, "I know you are trying to create this persona for your character, Mr. Irving, but could you ease up a tad on the Pokey-and-Gumby two-dimensionalness a bit?"
Yet I love him. Oh, assuredly, as I have breath and eyes, I intend to read everything this man hath writ.
And so, one might say, I love him in the purest sense, faults known!
Not according to a false sense of perfection.

I think that part of my infatuation.... no... pure love, is a result of reading the best novel first.
A Prayer For Owen Meany.
I began there, and after that novel, John Irving can do no wrong.

Now -- listen up, fellow fans.
[And if you are not an Irvingite, read Owen Meany, and get in the game...] but, I recently unearthed a delightful factoid.
NEW IRVING NOVEL, COMING OUT IN OCTOBER OF 2009.

Seriously, it is called Last Night in Twisted River.
Become a disciple.
Listen to this pre-release promotional video, which I myself have watched until I can recite it.

Keep reading folks.
Turn the damn TV off.
Cancel your cable!
Tilt it sideways. Turn that satellite dish into a huge ostrich-size birdbath.
[It's what an Irving character would do]!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Belgium is a nice place, though. It's the place people go to when they're on their way to another place, a place they're going to spend more time at.
It's kind of the Jennifer Aniston of countries.
-- Craig Ferguson --

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

The new Harry Potter movie is a sensation -- Harry Potter fans have started playing quidditch on college campuses across the country, but since their brooms don't fly, they just pretend they do. It's actually based on one of J.K. Rowling's lesser-known works, Harry Potter and the Silent Cry For Help.
-- Conan O'Brien --

Have a great Monday!
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1926

So I'm walking down the street today [Dalhousie Street, for those who need to know the whereabouts] and I see this sign, ["since 1927"] and I immediately think, "Dad was only one year old."
It's a reflex reaction.
I've been doing it for years.
My father was born in 1926.
And for some reason, that date, that YEAR has become fixed in my imagination as if it was the beginning of creation or something. No, that's not quite it -- rather, it is just that I find that I am continually using it as a sort of context....... for something.
My dad was only an infant, and "Dunn's" was already selling smoked meat sandwiches to people!
Stuff like that.
I'll be reading about the breakout of WWII and I'll think, "Wow, Dad was just 12 or 13, then."
And I think that part of the phenomenon has to do with the fact that I venerate the memory of my father, who passed away in 1999.
I mean, I recall him [vividly] describing so many things about his own early life, which is, of course, prior to my own life. His stories. They are the stuff of legend with me!

And so, whenever I see things, like the Dunn's sign, or any sort of 20th Century timeline or commemorative mark on a building, or for that matter, when I read books.... I will think stuff like, "Wow, this book was already in existence before my father was born."
In 1926, writers like Hermann Hesse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham were all in their heyday! As were T.S. Eliot, A.E. Houseman, and e.e. cummings.
And yet, I'm not kidding when I say that I think that my father did not read even ONE book in the course of his lifetime.
But I am constantly reading.
[I am convinced that I was mistaken for someone else's baby, in the maternity ward...] And I forever catch myself thinking things like, "Hmmm.... so the Narnia Chronicles were published in their entirety by the year 1954. At which time my Father was 28 years old. Did he know of them, at all?"

I know that he did NOT, in fact, know of them.
But other people did! Stuff in the literary world was totally happening.
I was addicted to reading through all the Enid Blyton books when I myself was a kid. I'd come home from the Library with armloads of them.
Well, when these books originally began coming out [in 1938] my Dad was 12 years old. Did he know of these books?
I know that he, in fact, did not.
I'll read that Rilke died in 1926, and my first thought is, "Hmmm... and my father breathed his first breath a month before this."
Stuff like that.
Jose Saramago was 4 years old when my father was born, and Yeats was 4 years dead.
It's forever happening.
I wonder if I'm just incorrigibly weird, or if any of you, out there, also have a year that is fixed in your mind as a sort of "context" year.
Aside from the obvious, your own birthdate, that is.

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It Was The World: A Saturday Poem

It Was The World

Mornings I would wait for them.
I never knew it then, but I did, I waited.
They had a way of arriving. Of staying --
He'd read a paper or a book.
She'd bury herself in a Harper's or New Yorker.
-- Of making me feel young.

Feigning a chore I would lean forward
just to hear some of their talk.
Refill his coffee, her tea, slowly, to catch more of it.
Those words between them like dew on grass,
sunlight aslant.

A wayward blueberry on her lip once sat
and she smiled, unbeknownst. No napkin
but his finger, lifted it. Right then it was the world.
When his head bent slightly to the left,
so did mine, and I loved her too.

So, today, when the bell tinkled,
and I turned with two saucers in my hands
toward one man -- nothing more needed to be said.

c. Ciprianowords Inc. 2009

Feeling Guilty... Perhaps?

I love books.
Plus, I have psychological problems.
Once, many many years ago, [before some of you were born] when I was having even worse psychological problems than I have on a regular basis nowadays, I checked myself in to a convent.
I needed some R & R.
Reassessment & Reconsideration.
Reconfiguring & Realignment.
Reflection & Reallyprayinghard.

It was place called _______, nestled away in the mountains of British Columbia.
[You will soon know why I leave the name... unnamed.]
The nuns there were so calm and.... nunnish! They were so nice to me, and it was so quiet there. The main room, where the Main Nun would have her talks with me, it had a massive plate-glass window looking directly upon a mountain in the distance. Like a painting.
We talked a lot. And I prayed a lot. I got some needed realignment done.

They had a little library.
At the time, I was a huge fan of the Hitlerian-era German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I had read nearly all of his works, including his Letters & Papers From Prison, but had never really read a biography of the man. And so I started to do so, during my spiritual retreat.
When it was over, I was not finished this book, so I took it with me.
But I told no one. I think I had some vague idea that I would return the thing one day.
But on top of not doing so, I moved away.
I still have the book, and took this picture of it minutes ago.
My theology has changed a lot in the intervening years. But still, a question hovers over my head this evening. I'm wondering if some of my dear readers will assist me in assessing which of the following scenarios most closely reflects my current state of culpability:

A) You will surely go to hell for having essentially stolen this book, regardless of the fact that you initially felt you would return it one day.
B) Everything mentioned in (A) above, with a few more years even beyond eternity added, because it was a Nunnery Library!
C) There is no such thing as hell, but even so, you have really canceled out all hope of going to heaven.
D) You should return the book via mail, with an explanatory note. [The address is stamped at the front of the book.]
E) Everything in (D) with sincere repentance added.
F) "F" stands for "Forget about it."
G) "G" stands for "God will not forget about it."
H) You obviously should check yourself in to some other institution of Realignment! [And don't steal stuff this time!]

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DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET!

I am very sorry, my dear friends.
This hurts me worse than it hurts you.
But this blogpage is not working. I'm getting all kinds of html messages, saying I am doing forbidden things, when all I am doing is doing as I have always done.
Simply trying to post my blogs!
So -- please be patient as I try to either a) figure this thing out, OR b) get a different site or something!
I SHALL RETURN!
All the best to you.
-- Cip --
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Splash du Jour: Monday

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

-- Elie Wiesel --

Problems in Blogland

I took the above picture of Parliament Hill as I walked around in Major's Hill Park yesterday afternoon. Thought that the juxtaposition was somehow illustrative of how we should look at.... government.
I post it to just once again do a test of what's going on with my Bookpuddle site.
For some reason, Blogger is not allowing me to cut and paste any text into my posting window.
This is not a very good situation, as any blogger can attest.
Anyhoo -- I am chagrined.
Perhaps it is a sign for me, as in, saying, DANGER! TIME TO FIND A BETTER BLOG PROVIDER!

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Blogspot Woes...

Today, this site is not letting me post anything greater than a sentence or so.
I find that to be seriously frustrating and not only so, but furthermore, I am going to...

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Vocationally, I have always struggled with the disparity between what I’m worth, and what I’m paid.
And aside from the remunerative issue, I have been consistently horrified by the great gulf that seems unspanably [and inexplicably] fixed between what I love to do, and what I spend most of my time and energy doing.
Working!
The situation, coupled with the fact that I have loved all of the other books I have read by this author, perhaps biases my review. I am a great fan of Alain De Botton. And I hate my work.
Gravitating toward The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is a no-brainer!
Straight up, I loved it. And I think you should read it.

Is there any more universally… [what is the word?....] “relatable” topic than work?
Our jobs?
What is the predominant feeling that wells up within you when you think about your source of income, your workplace, your vocation, your calling?
My choice of those four designations is deliberate, because, as you assess the import of those words, if all four of them adequately describe where you spend the bulk of your weekdays, you are one of the chosen few!
You are a rarity.
You are probably deriving much “pleasure” from your work environment.
I would suggest that most of us aren’t.
Many of the people in De Botton’s book, aren’t.
Yet, many are.
I disagree with other reviewers who criticize the book, saying De Botton focuses on chagrin and resentment.
Bollocks!
I think he cuts a fairly unbiased / disinterested, swath.
He introduces us to the painter Stephen Taylor, a man completely consumed and fulfilled by his work, even though, at the end of two years, he “has earned the equivalent of the annual salary of an unsuccessful plumber.” (p.190)
He introduces us to executives in corporations whose salaries would more than quadruple anything any of us can ever speculate on earning -- and yet one is left with a feeling approaching pity, for the emptiness, the woodenness of their lives.

De Botton delineates the process of how tuna gets from the ocean to the supermarket. [To the point of waiting in the frozen tuna aisle, and asking the lady who buys it if he and his photographer can go to her house and watch the kids eat the thing!]
How spaceships get into inner and outer space!
How the power gets to the switch on your wall.
Not only who makes the biscuits you eat, but who decides the exact font to be used on the packaging.
All of these processes involve livelihoods!

But The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is not a newspaper story.
It is a wonderful re-telling, poetic and ever-poignant -- pithy, witty, wonderful. Awe-inspiring.
And I found that the accompaniment photos were not only apropos, but artistically superb. It’s like reading Sebald. [Kudos to photographer Richard Baker for doing infinitely more than opening a shutter].

I’ve always felt that reviews should emphasize impression, rather than synopsis.
For summaries of what this book is about, there are many places one can go.
But I read the thing.
And my overwhelming feeling is that you should read it, too.

Why?
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL IN HERE, SOMEWHERE.

Whether you are someone who has chosen to follow your bliss like the painter Stephen Taylor, or whether you are like the accountant whose only real accomplishment after a lifetime of service is to have reached the comfortable “age of reminiscence”, which grants him the freedom to look back on all the pleasurable memories of his life and realize that these all encompassed moments when he was not working!
My own favorite chapter was entitled “Accountancy”, where, at one point De Botton said:
“For most of human history, the only instrument needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip. So long as workers had only to kneel down and retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules of employment had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be to a significant degree content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumours, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not profitably be sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well-being of employees commenced to be a supreme object of managerial concern.” (p.244)

As a professional "heaver of quarried stones", I was surprised to not happen upon a photo of myself among these pages.
All jokes aside, my wholehearted endorsement of this book surely has less to do with the fact that I am the current poster-boy for Unfulfilled Employment than it does with the fact that Alain De Botton is in the diametrically opposite position.

This book reaffirms my conviction that he has been, for a long while now, and is still currently, living his own vocational bliss.
→ BUY IT ←

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Splash du Jour: Friday

I’m reading a terrifically fascinating book.
← Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett.

"... no deeply religious person should object to the scientific study of religion with the presumption that it is an entirely natural phenomenon. If it isn't entirely natural, if there are really miracles involved, the best way -- indeed, the only way -- to show that to doubters would be to demonstrate it scientifically. Refusing to play by these rules only creates the suspicion that one doesn't really believe that religion is supernatural after all."
-- Daniel C. Dennett, in Breaking The Spell --

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Tragedy… is the consequence of man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself.
-- Arthur Miller --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
-- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth --

Have a great Wednesday!

Where I Stood

I heard this song while driving home, and just had to look it up when I got here.
Not only do I love the lyrics and think that this is terrific poetry, but it’s the phrasings, the style of the way she’s singing, that I truly dig.
It was just one of those moments when you are listening to the radio, and when the song is done you wish you could rewind and hear it again. On YouTube, I found this terrific LIVE unplugged version of Missy Higgins, singing Where I Stood.
Awesome.

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Give me a couple of years, and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.
-- Samuel Goldwyn –

Have a great Tuesday!