49 Cents an Hour

Thank God it is Friday!
If there was one more work day to this week I would end it in an asylum!
But, as it is, I worked late [again] and now I am having an evening coffee at Starbucks. The Starbucks that is in the Chapters bookstore.
I just went on a little gambol, a little stroll, and picked up a magazine I had never seen before.
It’s called PAGES: The Magazine For People Who Love Books.
Wow!
It is great!
I lamented the demise of that other periodical, called BOOK, but now there is PAGES!
It looks great!
I just read the cover story, an article entitled The Lions in Winter: Insight and Reflection from Literary Legends. Fascinating stuff. Really well done.
They interview writers like John Updike, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. LeGuin, Tom Wolfe, et al. Writers that have been around the block a few times.
All of it is interesting.
But I think the portion I liked best was the interview with veteran author, Joyce Carol Oates.
I must admit, I have never read any of her stuff, and yet I seem to have read a lot of stuff about her, here and there. Being a great fan of Niagara Falls, I have wanted to read her novel, The Falls for a long time now.

Anyhoo, here is the part of her interview that I found especially interesting:
PAGES →Forty years into a remarkable literary career, why do you still write?
J.C.O. →I write, basically, so that I can read sometime in the future a text that didn’t exist before, and with the hope that it will somehow amaze me. People have no idea how much I revise. It’s always thought that I write very quickly. If anyone could see how much revision I do, people would shake their heads and say, “Why would she work so hard?” My threshold of misery and frustration, it must be very high, because I do things that require a work ethic and a level of misery that is rare for anyone to undertake electively. To whip something off very quickly and send it out would have no pleasure to me at all. I would never do that. I labor over everything. Most writers are working at way below the minimum wage, if you figure out how much we make an hour. With me, it’s like 49 cents, I’m sure.

Besides the fact that this last comment reminds me of how close my own current wage is to this figure, I just found that whole idea of painstaking revision so…. intriguing. The writer, writing. The image.
I like that she does not dash something off and send it off to the printers.
In my extremely limited range of personal writing, I find that I too am meticulous and severe, as regards revision.
My biggest problem in writing is that I am trying to write the final draft from the get-go!
Reading Joyce’s response to the question reminds me of reading Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, where she describes, at one point, a time when she had written an entire novel, and her editor then told her to rewrite the thing from scratch.
I cannot imagine such an agonizing feat of self-speculation, and renunciation of initial treasure.
But she did it, Anne did.
She “booked” [← God, I am so hilarious] herself out on a retreat, rented a house, and on the empty hardwood floor, set out her entire book, page by page… walked in and out of it, examined it with a critical eye, picked it apart, threw certain pages in the garbage…. REWROTE it all!
I remember feeling weary, just reading of what she put herself through.
But somehow, I think that great writing must involve some measure of this. Really, I do.
Then again, there are novelists like Mordecai Richler [whom I consider a genius in both style and content] who said in a 1970 television interview, that his best writing was the stuff that flowed out from him and did not require too much revision or re-writing. Similarly, it is said that C.S. Lewis sent his handwritten work to the publisher and skipped all editing altogether. Anyone who has read him, knows that this is simply amazing. These guys were working in WYSIWYG.
[What you see is what you get!]
As for me, I seem to be still working in WYHNSIWIHNWY.
[What you have not seen is what I have not written yet!]

The article [in PAGES] went on to name the Next Generation of Lions.
These kind of listings are obviously so subjective, but yet I’m sure they reflect a significant general consensus. Those named were:
David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Bret Anthony Johnson, Andrew Sean Greer, Jonathan Safran Foer.
I did not at all see my name among these!
God, I am SOOOOOOOOOO undiscovered!
So, does anyone out there have anything to say of the work of Joyce Carol Oates?
What is your opinion?
Should she get a raise?

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Splash du Jour: Friday

It ought to be made possible for everyone to earn his living by doing work that is of intrinsic value and that is felt to be such by the worker himself. At present, most people do their work in order to earn the maximum remuneration and not for the sake of the value of the work itself. The profit motive ought no longer to be given top priority. But this most desirable change of motivation can be brought about only by a change of heart.
-- Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975)

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Reply to the Missouri Committee of Seventy, 30 Sept., 1864 –

Where is his like, today?
And more importantly, would anyone know enough, to elect him?

Have a great Thursday!

Ahhhhh! Apartment Life!

Wanna hear something hilarious, yet not?
So I just got home from a day of horrendous overtime, as usual. I seem to be intent upon working more hours than the average sled-dog team! Anyhoo, tonight... I pick up my mail at the main floor and crack a few of the items open as the elevator takes me up to 14 [which is really 13]!

The first thing I opened was from the "Management Office" of the building.

Keep in mind that I have lived here now, same place, for almost ten years, with not ONE COMPLAINT ever being levelled at me, aside from that note under the door saying that my noisy bathroom pipes needed some attention.
So I am opening this envelope tonight thinking that I am going to receive the "Bestest Tenant© " award, or maybe the "Nobel Prize for Exceedingly Awesome Tenancy© " or whatever. Thought that maybe they would be offering a retroactive rebate on the $16 million I have paid out to the invisible landlord over the years.
Not so.
None of these things had anything to do with the letter I read.
Somewhere around the 8th or 9th floor I am reading the following balderdash...

Contrary to your lease agreement, Article 24 (h), our office has received complaints about disturbances, noises that appear to have originated in your apartment. We would like to ensure that such disturbances do not continue, as they create an imposition on other tenants. A complaint was made concerning excessive stereo volume and bass levels. Please contact the rental office if you want to discuss the situation or if the issue does not originate from your apartment please let me know and we will need to further investigate the source of the problem. Please remember apartment living requires a certain amount of consideration for other tenants.

Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!
The funny thing is that I do not even have a stereo system in here. I only listen to iTunes© from my laptop.... granted the whole shemozzle is piped into my Yamaha© speakers, consisting of subwoofer and two little speakers.
Could this be causing such a kafuffle?
Such hemorrhaging in the communal hallway? Bleeding through the walls?
Good Lord© !
Do I write out an official complaint about Mr. Hai Karate© down the hall? [see yesterday's blog].
Has my cat, Jack, been having some kind of wild raves while I am at work?
Is he on crack? [I have wondered this for a while now, honestly.]
Granted, occasionally I may get a bit carried away here, playing Pink Floyd at a bit of a comfortably numb level or whatnot.... and there was that one time when I had Joe Satriani cranked until I myself got a sort of minor brain aneurism... but overall, I think that this complaint is unreasonable© .
I am a good boy.
But [at the same time] I don't want to get turfed out of here. I think maybe they are making this stuff up, trying to ruffle my feathers because they cannot get the going rate out of me, because I've been here so long.
What I mean is, if a new tenant moved in here, they would get an extra $400 out of him and/or her.
Could this be their motive?
Would they do such a thing? Make up lies, lies, LIES, I say.... about l'il ol' me?

Gotta go.
Gonna interrogate the cat now.
And he looks damn guilty of something.... I'm just not sure of what, yet.

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
-- Anne Frank (1929-1945) –

Have a great Wednesday!

IN XS!

The guy down the hall from me wears about eighteen times too much cologne.
Every morning he wages a fresh assault upon my nasal passages, and my patience.
I don’t know what the exact brand name is, I cannot identify it, but whatever it is, he is applying it in excess!
In excessious day-oh!
How can you tell someone they are wearing too much cologne?
It doesn’t seem like a very civil thing to do. Especially since the extent of my torment is this very brief moment in the morning. Can I not endure it?
The other factor to consider is the perpetrator is a very nice guy. He and I leave at about the same time for work, and several times we’ve talked as we’ve descended down to the parking garage. Small talk, and all the while I’ve been hoping there is no sudden spark, or [God forbid] open flame, any sort of ignition, or we would both go up in a mushroom cloud.
The guy is way overdoing it with the scent.
He is a schoolteacher. Of little kids.
What is he trying to do? Impress ten-year old girls with his fumes?
I don’t get it.

Amazingly, he is NOT the same guy I mentioned once before, here on this blogpage.
No. That guy moved to an adjoining building here at the triumverate of condo/apartments where I live.
This guy is new.
And he's not my direct neighbor, he lives far over on the opposite side of my hallway.
But the fumes!
OK, so why am I mentioning this today?
Well, because today, for the first time, my annoyance level reached a new..... Annoyance Level.
I was still IN MY OWN APARTMENT, and the wretched smell seeped through, under the door I guess, as I was putting my shoes on and kissing my cat goodbye.
In wafted this ferocious odor!
INTO my apartment!
That's going too far!
And I said to myself, “OK, this time, if he is still out there waiting for the elevator, DAMMIT, I am going to say something.”
But he wasn’t.
Hence, I didn’t.
What would you do?
Is there some way I can take legal action?

For moron, I mean, more on my own scent habits, CLICK HERE!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I recently had to take an emergency trip to Houston to visit my father who had developed a heart condition while on a business trip and was in the hospital. The day of the flight was extremely stressful. When I finally got to the hospital and saw my father recovering the next thing on my mind was Starbucks. I cannot tell you how calming it was to have a taste of home when I was many miles away.
-- William Stewart, from The Starbucks Experience, p.101 –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Vimy Memorial -- Arras, France

Q. Did you want to be in the war?
A. Yes.
Q. Were you crazy?
A. Yes, we were crazy, but we didn’t know it.
Q. Did you have any idea what it was going to be like?
A. No, we didn’t have any idea of what it was going to be like.
Q. What did you think war was?
A. An adventure. We never thought about being killed, you know. I thought I was going to be able to come home and tell everyone about it. It never entered my mind that I might not come back. We wanted to get to it as fast as we could, because it might be over before we got there.
-- Interview with Vimy veteran Leslie Hadd, aged 86, August 25, 1986 –

There should never be a day that is not Remembrance Day.

Have a great Monday!

A Poet's Heart

For the second day in a row I have slept-in.
Hibernated. Zonked.
← Like a darted rhino.
I love weekends. I love the freedom of waking when my body is ready to do so, and spending an hour or two just wondering what it is I may want to do with the day, and having no real prior plans, one way or the other.
For some people, that sort of scenario could precipitate panic, or something near to it. Nothing to do, and all day to do it.
They need or at least prefer a prior schedule. The day, slotted with specific things that need to be done or accomplished.
This is an entirely valid way to live, I am not slighting it. It is just not the way I myself am set up.
I prefer the opened up, undefined vista. In fact, I jealously guard the continuance of this feature of the unaccounted-for time that is allotted me. Often I wonder where this desire originated, in me. The conclusion I sometimes arrive at, is that I am inherently lazy. The thing is, there is no one I know of, that is LESS lazy than I am, during the other five days of the week!
I am working in a very physically and mentally demanding job for a minimum of 10 full hours a day, and I never ever miss work. I don’t even “use” my allotted sick days. I only call in sick if I actually have something like malaria, or worse.
Is this how an inherently lazy person lives?
I don’t know.
For now I am going to go with the following personally-believed explanation of my unrestricted access to leisure time → I have a poet’s heart!
More than anything else I treasure, I want to maintain the right to compose absolutely irrelevant poetry, without having to justify it to myself or anyone else.
Poetry LIKE THIS!
Have a great Sunday, all!
-- Cip

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I'm a Beta-Blogger

Hey, I bit the bullet [after eating a hamburger] and became a beta-blogger.
The new upgraded blog format.
--- Let's see what happens!
--- Cip

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My Burger Fling©

It is official.
I’m coming out of the closet on this one.
I’m addicted to Burger King and/or Burger King products.
[The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem.]
Specifically, it is the Angus Steak ‘Shroom & Swiss Burger© [shown above] that is getting to me.
When I even think of the thing, it's like dynamite goes off in my brain.... Swiss, 'shroom, HISS, BOOM!

See, on the way to Starbucks, after work, I have lately been detouring past this Burger King and going through the drive-thru and ordering up one of these beauties.
Then I eat it, while driving down Ogilvie Street, with my car on sort of auto-pilot, out of control. → I’m breathing heavy, running reds, and steering with my knee.
It’s like I’m on crack!
No combo. No drink.
Just the burger. It is driving me mental.
Why can’t I stop?
Why?

It started a few weeks ago. Yeah, there were a couple of days where I resisted the urge. But overall? No!
This burger’s got my number.
It's the meatness of the thing…. I don’t know.
It is just so…. Angussy!
As it is, even before this current passion I only had one or two arteries unclogged, but now I am beginning to worry. What is going to happen to my youthful figure?
At work, around 5 p.m. I start shaking and [this worries me even more...] mooing!
I’ve seen the movie “Supersize Me.”
I’m scared.
Vewwy vewwy scared.

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Splash du Jour: Friday

People who have a “freshness of appreciation” repeatedly, though not continuously, experience awe, pleasure, and wonder in their everyday world. They are able to stop walking down the street and all of a sudden appreciate the vertical symmetry of skyscrapers that line up vertically in one’s field of vision.
-- Cipriano –

For moron, I mean, MORE ON this topic, click HERE!
Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

If we are imprisoned in ourselves, books provide us with the means of escape. If we have run too far away from ourselves, books show us the way back.
-- Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948) –

Have a great Thursday!

On Flatulence

Hi, everyone.
I am chilling out and listening to Lenny Kravitz.
My work has been seriously trying to kill me and this is why I have not been around very much.
This evening, after work I went to Starbucks and read a bit in The Canterbury Tales.
I am still chipping away at that book. Tonight’s reading was positively hilarious.
The Summoner’s Tale.
Much ado about flatulence!
Oh my!
Chaucer. You little stinker!
This is the tale in the Prologue of which, we learn that there is a special place in Hell reserved for friars.
It is sort of even worse than the regular hell.
Down low, in “Lucifer’s pavillion” we are told that Satan has a tail….

“As broad or broader than a barge’s sail.”
[I was already laughing, but the party was about to get rowdier…]
“Hold up thy tail, thou Satan!” then said he,
“Show forth thine arse and let the friar see
The nest ordained for friars in this place!”
Ere the tail rose a furlong into space
From underneath it there began to drive,
Much as if bees were swarming from a hive,
Some twenty thousand friars in a rout
And swarmed all over Hell and round about,
And then came back as fast as they could run
And crept into his arse again, each one.

Wow! Quite the imagery.

Later, we find that the friar is sermonizing to an ailing man, and this parishioner is not exactly sympathetic nor blind to the friar’s gross hyposcrisies.
So, he tells him that he has a gift for him, but he must reach in back of him and get it from the place where he lies in bedridden mischiefery... and Chaucer tells us:

When the sick man could feel him here and there
Groping about his fundament with care,
Into that friar’s hand he blew a fart.
There never was a farmhorse drawing cart
That farted with a more prodigious sound.

I nearly spewed coffee all over the Starbucks.
It got even funnier from this point onward.
But suffice it to say that it reminded me of a book that was once sent to me by my reading partner a.k.a → The better half of the Surfacing Reading Club.
Being an English teacher herself, and as downright marmy as one could be, she sent me A Handbook To Literature….. more commonly referred to as the Thrall & Hibbard. It’s a great book. A classic, published in 1936.
I remember initially leafing through it and reading some of the articles therein. One that especially caught my interest was called The Divine Afflatus.
Here is what it says:

Divine Afflatus, The: A phrase used to mean poetic inspiration, particularly the exalted state immediately preceding creative composition, when the poet is felt to be receiving his inspiration directly from a divine source. The doctrine of divine inspiration for poets was advocated by Plato. Although the phrase and doctrine have been used in a serious and sincere sense by such a poet as Shelley, the term is perhaps more often used now in a somewhat contemptuous sense, to imply a sort of pretensious over-valuation in a would-be poet or a bombastic spirit in an orator, whose fervid style or manner is felt not to be justified by the actual substance of the poem or oration.

I loved that little article, instantly recognizing how many times I myself had experienced divine flatulence!
So I sat down immediately, ate a can of beans, and wrote a poem that same night.
It’s called The Divine Afflatus, and if you want to read it, fart → HERE!

Have a goood evening/day, all!

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.
-- Jeanette Winterson –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Now that hunting season is in full swing… the Brave Warriors emerge from the trees!
What a Mighty Hero!
What a Monument of Prowess!
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
-- James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), Oceana, 5, 1886 –

→ A former RANT.

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel –

Have a great Monday!

An Afternoon In Thinkville

Did you ever have one of those days where you just want to sit at home, drink coffee, mellow out, drink coffee, turn some Tears For Fears down real low, talk to the cat a bit… muse upon life?
That’s where I am at today. I want to spend an afternoon in Thinkville.
← Feeling a bit like this fish here. That’s me, today.
There is never a lack of things to think about, if you really think about it.

One thing that is currently driving me mental involves a certain painting I discovered. I should back up a bit perhaps, to the genesis of my obsession.
A couple of weekends ago I did something quite unusual for me. I went to a coffeeplace OTHER than Starbucks. Yes, I know, it is difficult for me to believe also. I was walking down Sussex and for some reason, turned into the Timothy’s on Sussex and George, rather than walking across the street to my venerated Chapters/Starbucks.
In I went.

I ordered their strongest brew and looked around the place, doctoring my beverage with some cream and honey. Hmmm… place was filled with some real neat abstract artwork.
I sat down at this one table. And then, instead of plowing directly into the reading of a book, I looked straight ahead. And then it happened. The epiphanous moment.
I was transfixed.
And here is what I saw.My fascination was instantaneous, but my realization of WHY, was not.
And I think this is probably a hallmark of great art.
The capture happens quite quickly, and before you have time to be fearful of what happened, your captor speaks to you, in soothing tones. Informs you that you are free to leave, and you don’t want to.
I just kept staring at the painting, and it kept speaking. It has not stopped doing so.

Soon I began to see that my fascination had a lot to do with two major factors:
1) I like lines. I have always been this way. My sense of interior decoration bears this out. I prefer sharp angles. I like “Z” or “X” better than “C” or “O”. On my wall is a very square, steel clock. My main lamp has zero roundness to it. Rectangular shade, base and body. I like definite corners, vertical symmetry.
2) My second area of fascination has to do with the fact that I see a lot of my own specific character in this work of art. It’s the red line going through the center of the grid of lines that kills me.
Perhaps it is difficult to see on my page here, but the center line is red, as opposed to the surrounding black lines.
Only one is red. I love that.
The red line is me.

I began to see that, ideologically speaking, this red line is an amazing depiction of the way my own thought processes have developed and evolved in the past tumultuous decade of my life.
At the lower left-hand corner, the red line begins (notice this) UNDER the general toothpick pile of lines. One might even say → begins under what appears to be a lot of confusion.
As it reaches upwards it penetrates (at the center, no less) all other competing lines and comes out on top of them.
I love this.
All of these other lines (ideas, for me the lines are ideas, systems) try to get to the center of the field of view, but they never do. That space remains blank, but for the red line’s presence. At some point, these others are avoiding a central issue. What results is a sort of spiraling or design that appears to have a pattern to it, but only as it is dependent on other lines to make it so. Any single line is stunted, half-baked, compared to this red line.
[Does this interpretation begin to sound arrogant? I concede that it appears to be so, but it is not so, in reality.]

There is only one other line one must speak about.
This is the black line that lies atop all of them, including the red.
See it there? Vertically leaning, to the left of center?
It is the only UNBROKEN line. Avoiding the corners, and even the center, yet declaring itself, nonetheless.
I don’t like it.
I know what that line is.
This is the line of Arrogance.
The line that does not want to work through competing systems, but would prefer to rely upon domination.
To lazily lie atop them all and say “I am King” and there is no other. I need not work with the Center, need not meet the Center, for I am the Center.

The last thing I will mention is that the red line is the only line that makes it from corner to corner. See that?
But on the way to its freedom, there was pain. There is an “Ow”… “Owww”… “Owww” in that bottom portion of its journey. It was broken.
This painting is me.

The artist is a man by the name of Bill Murray.
No, not the guy from Groundhog Day and SNL!
I URGE you to visit Bill Murray and his work. → CLICK HERE!
I desperately want to own this painting, and I will own it.
It is called Obliquity 5. Purchase one for yourself HERE!
I have a wall picked out for it. Yes I do. As soon as I resolve a minor budgeting issue here, this painting is going to be on my wall.
To remind me of who I am.
_______

I am greatly looking forward to tonight because it is Entmoot Night.
What?
Entmoot Night.
This is a weekly meeting where three friends and I discuss all manner of “Red Line” type things. Thankfully, none of us are The Black Line.
At our various unique stages of journey, we help each other see toward the upper right hand corner of ever-decreasing ignorance.
The land beyond the frame….
You can find out way more than you ever wanted to know about Entmoots, HERE.

P.S.
In thinking about the Obliquity 5 painting this afternoon, an old poem I wrote, came to mind. You can find it HERE if you so choose to visit.
Knowing where we are always involves knowing where we’ve been.
I leave you today with this final thought.
If you are breathing, and if you are healthy, think.
This is no time to be bored.
Be the red line.

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Tempted... I am tempted.

My reading partner, she who comprises the better half of the elite Surfacing Book Club© … she has been playfully suggesting that we read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis.
So this evening I had a look at the book, in the store. I just love the look and the feel of this newest edition, published by Scribners. And even the typeface, I mean the actual print, the font that is used… I love it. And the paper itself. And the smell. Scribners can really make a nice book. OK, I am saying all of this preamble to just mention that I am now really interested in reading the thing.
She does this to me all the time. Mentions a book and then I go mental.
I can’t believe I left the book at the store and did not buy it [yet].
Thing is, I have STACKS of new books all over my apartment that I have yet to get to!
In fact, some of the stacks have littler stacks stacked on top of them. I’ve been wanting to re-read the gargantuan Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. You know, the book about the last tsars? The fall of the Russian monarchy? Rasputin and all that jazz? But she complains that the book is too much like the SIZE of Russia.

So… Massie or Kazantzakis. Who will win the day?
Yes, you know it as well as I do. → Jesus will win.

All of this anticipatory speculation about reading The Last Temptation of Christ reminds me of a fabulously good novel called The Gospel According To Jesus Christ. Written by none other than my favorite living author, Jose Saramago.
Saramago makes me wish I could read Portuguese!
This book remains as one of my all-time favorite Saramagian works!
For die-hard Christian biblical literalists the story will come down hard, like a spike in the foot, for sure. At times it seems downright blasphemous, mostly because it presents fictionalized aspects of Christ’s life that are not typically mentioned, thought about, or spoken about. [Much like Kazantzakis’s book, I would assume]. It is certainly not the flannel-board Jesus of Sunday School days. Not the man who sat on rocks all day gently sermonizing while little kids climbed all over him.
But the fact must (I think) be acknowledged that much of Jesus's earthly life is in the realm of obscurantism, biblically and otherwise. There is much about him that we do not KNOW! Theologically speaking, Saramago definitely presents and elaborates upon what is known as a "Christology from below" (that which emphasizes the humanity, the human nature of Christ) as opposed to a "Christology from above" (that which would emphasize the divinity of Christ).
Saramago's Jesus BECOMES the Christ.
It is significant that in the novel, nowhere is he called Christ, except in the title of the book.
It just makes you realize the legendary aspect of Jesus. I mean... Joseph and Mary's last name, in the telephone directory, was not Christ.
It is a profound and engaging exploration of the self-realization of Jesus of Nazareth. Not meant to be a comparative text to the Bible, nor meant to replace the Bible. An account, written by one who is definitely familiar with the Bible, yet does not subscribe to a personal faith in its tenets. Saramago is avowedly atheist.
Some Christian readers would be summarily offended by this book. Others, like myself, (a sort of pseudo-lapsed neo-hybrid exiled/agnostified Christian) would not.
I found it positively invigorating. If Kazantzakis’s book is half this good, it will be good indeed.
Reading Saramago is a stretch, yes. But all proper exercise begins with a few stretches.
And speaking of exercise, I think I will go and rearrange a few of my stacks of stacks.

→ Memories of The Saramago Fiasco!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being 'moved' by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
-- Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness --

Have a great Friday!

Order In Consciousness

For a long while now I have been in the process of writing a book about my dad. He succumbed to a lengthy battle with congestive heart failure, and passed away on Dec.13th, 1999. I have several chapters of the book completed, but a long ways to go yet. It is, hmmm… how can I put this, a "severely procrastinated labor of love."
It will be called I Have A Picture©. Each chapter will begin with a photo of my dad, followed by an elaborate discussion of the memories that the photos stir up, within me.
My main goal is to present the book to my mother, his wife of 48 years.
Publishing is not even an issue, I just want to present the book to my family. My mom and my four siblings. And perhaps also, my favorite aunt. Aunt Evelyn.
So the book will have a circulation of six readers. [May have to go into reprintings, we're not sure yet!]
Ummm.... I don't think it will be short OR long-listed for the Booker!

Thing is, I sent the unfinished draft to my best friend, and she read it all. She is my editor, my proof reader, my reading partner, my muse, and most importantly, [as mentioned] my best friend.
And she is a high-school English teacher. In rural Illinois.
And so, you know how English teachers are, right? Always trying to find something new to inflict upon students?
Well, a certain section of I Have A Picture was just generalized enough to warrant infliction upon these unsuspecting youths. The topic is solitude.
She assigned it to them as an exercise in which they had to write a brief statement of their opinions of my whacky theories.
It was so neat for me to think that an entire classroom of Illinois teenagers had to look at this piece and say, “What? We have to read this crud? Awww, jeez!”
[Do kids still say “Jeez”?]
And so now… I am inflicting it upon you, my faithful blogreaders.
Yes…. it is time for, Cipriano Bookpuddle’s….

Order In Consciousness

Dad and I could not be any more different than in this one area, our attitude toward solitude. He hated it. I love it. He tried to avoid it. I can’t get enough of it.
Solitude, or “being alone” is a fascinating thing. To really understand it, we need to talk about how we go about creating “order in consciousness”.
The normal state of the mind is chaos. We don’t usually notice how little control we have over the mind, because our own habits channel our energy so well that thoughts seem to follow each other by themselves without a hitch. From the time we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night we are constantly making decisions of how we will create order in consciousness.
For some this may mean flicking on the radio, for others it may mean arguing, or praying, making coffee, listening to the news… soon it involves making breakfast, driving to work, work itself, etc. All day long a barrage of things (life itself) is conspiring to help us NOT THINK ABOUT THINKING.
All of these things I’ve mentioned take up a certain percentage of our concentration. For instance, as we drive we know we must stay on a certain side of the road, maintain a certain speed, stop at certain signs or lights, change gears, signal when turning etc. And all of this, whether we are aware of it or nor, creates order in consciousness. The mind is constantly asking to be directed somewhere… talk to this person, pick this up, blow your nose, etc.
And generally, the younger you are, the more intense is the need. This is why kids need to be playing a video game, watching T.V., talking on the phone, and why we are forced to go “Googly-ga-ga Boobly-moogly” to a baby so it quits crying. Or give it a rattle to play with. Because the conscious mind needs stimulus, it needs order. And this is natural. It follows that the more immature your mind is, the more you need external things to create order in it.
So what happens when there is no stimulus? No order? You are not driving somewhere, or talking, or arguing, or watching T.V.?
What about when you are alone?
Well, here’s the thing… now you have to CREATE order in consciousness. This is something you have to work at… it’s a discipline, it doesn’t come naturally. That’s why babies don’t understand it, and they need so much attention and diversion. Their very existence becomes something to cry about.
Well, when an adult is in the same predicament, that’s very sad! Here’s the thing. Creating order in consciousness can only be developed in solitude, and if you constantly avoid solitude you will never learn how to create order in consciousness.
You will never develop the art of inner dialogue that is needed to be at peace when you are alone and unoccupied. You will remain dependent upon other people to give meaning to your decisions. And you will become bored too easily.
Writing a letter (writing anything for that matter), reading a book, sitting under a tree and just thinking… all of these require a certain amount of freedom to be alone with your thoughts. The person who never embraces solitude will never experience the benefits that can come from something as simple as sitting under a tree and thinking.
A mature person ought to be able to hear their own thoughts without having to bounce them off of someone else’s eardrums. (Or much worse, their own eardrums… just think of people who walk down the street and talk out loud to themselves)!
__________________

BTW…. I want to see your report handed in on Monday morning!

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

“Where was it,” thought Raskolnikov, “where was it I read about a man sentenced to death who, one hour before his execution, says or thinks that if he had to live on some high rock, on a cliff, on a ledge so narrow that there was only room enough for him to stand there, and if there were bottomless chasms all round, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, and eternal gales, and if he had to spend all his life on that square yard of space – a thousand years, an eternity – he’d rather live like that man than die at once! Oh, only to live, live, live! Live under any circumstances – only to live.”

-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 1866 –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such allieviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
-- Harold Bloom –

Have a great Wednesday!

Happy Halloween!

Well, it is a night for basic witchery and all-out goblinry!
And a perfect night for it... the moon is mysterious, as clouds drift past. The streets are wet, there is the threat of rain. And [I swear this is the truth] an actual witch just flew past my fourteenth floor apartment.
Sounded like a Toyota Tercel!
OK, I've got a few treats for you.
First, some words from a very funny guy, on Halloween. Ye must click HERE for this, ye ghouls and boys.
Secondly, and this is even better.... in fact, if you've only got time for one re-routing tonight, I urge you to click on this second option, for it is my own thoughts on the physicdal properties of actual witchflight. Seriously, you really need to read this before you retire for the evening.... CLICK HERE!
Happy Halloween, all!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.
-- Joseph Conrad –

Have a safe and scary Halloween… after you read my own scarrrrrrrrry Halloween poem!

Splash du Jour: Monday

I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book, Alain de Botton’s, The Architecture of Happiness.
Sent to me by a friend. → T.y.L.i.I.
“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
-- Alain de Botton –

Have a great Monday!

The Brilliance of the Bard...

Recently I finished reading an excellent book.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
It is worth mentioning that writing about this particular imaginative genius requires the biographer to call upon colossal reserves of his own imagination! Speculation. It is as if to know about the man who wrote the immortal lines, one must read between them. The sparcity of source documentation regarding Shakespeare’s life would send anyone less hardy than Greenblatt running for other topics to ponder! Other books to write. But Greenblatt wrote this one. And man, the result is fine.
He has succeeded in sifting through a wealth of incidental knowledge and historically-based inference to provide any attentive reader with a coherent, chronological life of the Bard that reads like an epic novel.
Is every shred of it factual and unable to be presented in a different light?
No.
No biography is.
But such is perhaps especially the case with Shakespeare, extant documentation being as fragmentary as it is. In uncountable details he will forever be a mystery, but what a blasted good interpretation Greenblatt has given us here.
Everywhere, and by that I mean on practically every page of these 390, the author employs phrases such as “it seems likely that,” or “this being the case, Shakespeare would have,” or “Then, sometime in the mid 1580’s,” or “it is possible that hints may lie...” in order to get the point across. In this sense, there is nothing positively dishonest in these pages, but rather, we see an almost constant reference to the author’s need to be speculative.
His method is to begin each chapter with some bare-bones or otherwise undisputed sort of “fact” [if you will] and then proceed onward, enfleshing this skeleton with the sinew and muscle of corroborating evidence.
Is some of it hearsay?
Hell, yeah!
But for me, [someone who is convinced that being any sort of Shakespearean purist is a waste of time], I just merrily flip the pages, reading like a voracious tiger. And tiger-like, blissfully oblivious of what I do not know. When it comes to Will-ology, if someone like Harold Bloom is frustrated “not because we do not know enough, but because there is not enough to know…” then, surely to God, I myself am not going to lose any sleep over the issue of Bard-bio accuracy!
Greenblatt’s Shakespeare emerges as a man capable of forming the most passionate love stories and poems, while he himself endures an unhappy marriage, and enjoys few amorous adventures. Here is a man who creates the raucous Falstaff, and is himself not necessarily the life of the party. A man who associates with the greatest revelers of his day, and yet does not seem to succumb to the same depths of debauchery and criminal low-dealings as did they. A man who rose from ignoble beginnings to the heights of fame, success, and riches. An enigma in so many ways, from start to finish. The glovemaker's son, destined to command entire sections of modern-day bookstores, four centuries on. That is who you meet here.
I could go on and on about specifics of the book, but I won’t. There are many synopses you can find that would be better than mine. Perhaps the most useful thing I can say is that reading literary biography can be about as exciting as eating a bowl of dust. This book was not like that at all. It was exciting, and engaging, from page one to 390. And fun.
Not that I’ve read very many, but for now I am going to conclude that this is the best book about Will.
In the world!

Some former words on the subject...

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"Can't tell a book...

… by its cover!”
Yes, I know!
I know that we cannot judge a book by its cover, but nonetheless, purely in the realm of the aesthetically pleasing, I must pass out some Bookpuddle blog-kudos to whoever it was that designed the cover of Richard Ford’s new book, The Lay of The Land.
This is going to sound so superficial of me, but this is the best book cover I have seen in a long time.
Just look at it.
Everything about the coloration is perfect.
The symmetry of the word versus image ratio. The fact that the title speaks of land, but the image shows only an expanse of water.
This is the best looking dustjacket I have seen in a long while.
I hate bad dustjackets.
Look at how good this one is.
Just the other day I stared at this book cover for quite a while, and, knowing nothing of the author, almost bought the thing, based on how good its cover is.
Has anyone out there read the thing, or anything by the author?

If I myself ever write a book, I want it to shamelessly blare its worthiness from the bookstore shelf like Richard Ford’s new one does.

P.S. An update, many hours later. I had another look at the book this afternoon and can now attach specifics to my previous random-kudos.
Dustjacket photography: Chris Jones.
Dustjacket design: Carol Devine Carson

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Splash du Jour: Friday

The only winnable nuclear war is the one we prevent.
-- Cipriano –

Have a great Friday!

The Four Sentences...

She stole it from someone else, and now I myself am stealing this little meme-game from Dorothy’s current blog, and the instructions are as follows:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

OK, so, following these instructions to the “T” I grabbed the absolute nearest book, which was closer than about a foot and a half away, and here are the four sentences:

Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmorgrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensitive in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Their monuments were meant to display how important they were.

If anyone can correctly guess which book this excerpt is from, I promise you that The Bookpuddle Foundation© will promptly send you $320,450 in the mail!
[NOTE: To help you out a bit, the image shown in this blog is such a good subliminal hint that I am now lowering the cash prize to $1.99 in Canadian funds!]

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.
-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, 1962 –

Have a great Thursday!

East of Eden

Today’s Splash du Jour has had me thinking about Steinbeck. I love his stuff.
My favorite of his novels, [thus far] has been East of Eden.
Steinbeck proposed four potential titles before he settled upon East of Eden. I looked up the phrase in the Bible and found that it appears twice in Genesis (3:24 and 4:16); both accounts denoting an instance where man allegedly experienced a separation from the blessings that God had intended for him.
I think this is very significant as we consider what Steinbeck was writing about in his allegorical novel. He says in Chapter 34, "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal."
The contest is in ourselves!
Surely this is what East Of Eden quietly teaches us while we enjoy the sweeping story, so well told. It is deadly realistic, as beautiful and revolting as is the actual human potentiality for good and evil. With brilliance, Steinbeck contrasts a sea of temperaments in these characters, and shows us all the while that life is much more than the choices we make, but it is never any less.
Adam Trask is the representative of good intentions, of a conscience which responds to the good as the eye responds to the light. Samuel Hamilton also represents a similar (perhaps even more well-honed) goodness. But Adam is the one who has been deceived, by a force every bit as essentially evil as Eden's serpent in the tree. This force is Cathy, a character so reprobate that evil isn't something she does, it's something she is that infects everything she does! After abandoning her twin boys Caleb and Aron to the care of their father (Adam) she returns to her life of debauchery. The boys grow up unaware that their mother is a serial murderer and owner of a whorehouse.
Because Adam never fully recovers from his shame, his loss and disillusionment, he is not able to convey the appropriate unconditional (equally distributed) love to his sons. This leads to jealousy and rivalry in his boys, and is a generational replica of his own childhood.
How can one summarize such a vast epic story? But for me, one of the most powerful scenes and a turning point (perhaps the denouement?) is when Caleb finally sees his mother in all her non-glory, and says to her, "I don't have to be you." The reader can notice that really no-one is the same from this point on, there is a real unraveling here. For Cathy (now "Kate"), this marks the beginning of her own self-destruction, the awakening of her own conscience. She's been defied!
One of the tendencies of the modern age is to deny radically the absolute nature of conscience, reducing it to a matter of temperament, or to a product of history or social environment.
But East of Eden plows right through a tangle of sociological, psychological, and historical half-truths to the elementary fact: CONSCIENCE EXISTS.

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

I wonder if I will ever be this famous for my literary achievements…
Little presses write to me for manuscripts and when I write back that I haven’t any, they write to ask if they can print the letter saying I haven’t any.
-- John Steinbeck, soon after publication of The Grapes of Wrath –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Hamlet: What’s the news?
Rosencrantz: None my Lord, but that the world’s grown honest.
Hamlet: Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true.
-- Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.240 –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

If I am ever lying on my death bed, having lost the will to live, just bring me a kitten.
If it doesn't revive me, let me go.
-- The euthanistic sentiment of someone very dear to me. –

Have a great Monday!

My BIHBTARBNAR List

When it comes to the topic of “Books I Have Been Thinking About Reading But Not Actually Reading” right at the top of the List would have to be this one… Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
I have been thinking about reading it for about sixty-seven years now.
And I even have this [as shown] pristine hardcover 1968 reprint of the original 1943 Bobbs-Merrill first edition.
So what’s the holdup?
From whence cometh my January molasses attitude toward diving into this book, which begins with the immortal sentence “Howard Roark laughed.” [?]
I don’t know. Honest to God. I have wanted to read it for so long.
When I consider some of the books I have been wanting to read for eons, I notice that they do tend to have a lot of pages… that’s at least one determining factor. For instance, here is my current BIHBTARBNAR List:

1. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
2. Middlemarch – George Eliot
3. The Odyssey – Homer
4. Barney’s Version – Mordecai Richler
5. Trinity – Leon Uris
6. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
7. Russka – Edward Rutherfurd
8. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber
9. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
10. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

Does this sort of procrastinatory thing happen to you also?

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Apparently we are now living, in America, in what is referred to as the Post-Torture Era. Which, being interpreted, might possibly mean that if we need to torture you, we will use a post!
-- Cipriano --

Have a great Friday!

Literary Purloinage

I am reading a book but not buying it.
And by “not buying it” I don’t mean “not believing it”…. I mean, “not purchasing it.”
So let’s talk about this for a moment here.
The fine art of reading entire books in the store but not buying them, because, [for one thing] I do it all the time!
The book in question is Alice Munro’s new one, The View From Castle Rock.
Does my conscience bother me that I am slowly making my way through this book every day by taking it off the shelf and reading the next chapter, but never buying it?
Not really.
Thing is, as soon as the book came out I did buy a copy of it and sent it to my reading partner, in the mail. So, in a sense, I did pay for the thing at one point in the continuum of my overall purloinage. [← Is that a word? It should be.]
Therefore, in an ethical sense, I truly believe that my going to hell after I die will have much more to do with other issues!

There is the problem of detection, though.
The behavior I am describing is understandably frowned upon.
They [The Store Authorities] don’t like the books to go into the Starbucks section, [where I pretty much live…] in fact, there are signs everywhere forbidding such action, and occasionally someone working for the bookstore will tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sir, did you purchase that book?”
I must admit, it is a bit unnerving.
I’m sure the look on my face is at least a bit like Adam’s was when God finally showed up and asked him how the apple tasted!
But I have devised a neat way of circumventing the possibility of guilt feelings ruining my reading session. Before I sit down with my coffee, I remove the dustjacket of the book and hide it somewhere. That way it looks as though I am reading one of my own books, and no one bothers me. No tap on the shoulder. No voice from heaven. I read on in Edenic bliss.
Later, I simply replace the dustjacket and put the book back on the shelf.

I have friends who do the same.
They read the books but do not buy them. One instance in particular, comes to mind. For the sake of anonymity, I will call this friend of mine Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In other words, his real name is probably not Tim. [D’oh!]
OK, so Alexander Solzhenitsyn was doing just what I am describing here. Over a period of time, he was reading a whole entire book in the store. I'll never forget. It was was M. Scott Peck’s, The Different Drum.
And as he read through the thing, he would tell me all about it. I began to know exactly what chapter he was on…. exactly where he was, in the book.
So one day I went to the store before he himself got there and I found the very book he was reading. Luckily, there was only one copy on the shelf. I opened up to the chapter I knew he would be reading that evening, and I placed a sticky note on the very page. [These are easily removable and would not damage the book].
On the note, I wrote, “Don’t think we don’t see you Mr. Solzhenitsyn. We have been watching you read this book, every day! Signed, The Management.”
And I placed the book back on the shelf, and left the store.
Needless to say, Alexander called me that very evening, telling me of his adventure. Said he felt like he was back in the Gulag!

Well, I must go. I am at the Bookstore right now!
And I sort of forget where I placed the dustcover this time around…. it may take a bit of looking….

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
-- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 –

Sobering huh?
All the same, have a great Thursday!

My Work Is Trying To Kill Me...

The title of this blog is actually a plea.
While I have your attention, please, call the Humane Society and report to them that you've been made aware of an old dog that is being mistreated!
Seriously, this picture to the left is a picture of me after work today.
Because of a confluence of about nineteen unfortunate things, coupled with the fact that even at the best of times my workplace is a living hell and virtual realm of Unending Torment, I am in the midst of one of the worst work weeks ever.
I am saying all of this to justify the nakedness of my blog, I guess.
I'm out of gas. The tank is empty.
Like tonight for example, worked from 8 a.m. till 8 p.m.
I could not even bring myself to go to Starbucks after work and read. No energy. None.
Just came home to my cat, Jack. And talked with him a bit.
Bulldog to Ragdoll!

So, please be patient with me.
This blogpage usually reflects the true state of my Inner Comedian and/or Inner Book Enthusiast.
But right now, both of these personas are wondering which bridge they should jump off of.
I'll be back. I'll be back. I'm going to get some medication.
In the meantime I am thinking of something that the legendary Robert Frost once said:
"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day."
Hmmm... all I know for sure is that I worked a full twelve hours today, and I sure ain't no boss!
Two roads diverged in a wood.
I took the one more WORKED upon!

All the best to you!
May you never find yourself in a place of employment, as relentless, as unrelenting as my own.
Cheers!
-- Cip

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

The problem with religion – as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology – is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
-- Sam Harris, in Letter To A Christian Nation –

Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

Part of a reader's job is to find out why certain writers endure. This may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about a book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you. You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.
-- Francine Prose, in Reading Like A Writer –

Have a great Monday!

For The Love of Pumpkin

Just the other day… no wait, let me state the following disclaimer → What you are about to read may be rather difficult to believe.

OK, just the other day at work, a bunch of us were sitting around the big oval table at lunchtime.
Chowing down, and talking.
I guess the topic of Thanksgiving dinner was raised…. as in, “So, did you eat a lot of turkey?”
That kind of mindless mumble, where you yourself forget your question before anyone answers it. Flies in the same room are having more meaningful conversation!
[For those of you who may be CCC, or → Canuck-Calendar Challenged, last Monday was Thanksgiving Day here in the Great White North. You know? Where turkeys walk around pre-frozen and need only to be knocked over, thawed out, and shoved into pre-heated ovens?]
Anyhoo, someone asked, “How about the pumpkin pie? Eat a lot of pumpkin pie?”
And Mike, a co-worker of mine said, “I have never eaten pumpkin pie in my life.”

BLASPHEMY!
OFF WI’ ‘IS ‘EAD!
I was like…. “Excuse me? What the hell did you just say?”
[Flies stopped talking].
“Really. I’ve never eaten pumpkin pie,” he meekly repeats, as we all stare at him, agape. Eating our microwaved leftovers.
Seriously though.
What planet is this guy from?
He is about 45 years old, Mike is. And human, I think.
I mean, I am still wondering how he could have possibly been alive this long of a time, and not ever eaten pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin pie is….. wait now, how does one even say it correctly…. let me try…. OK, pumpkin pie is like, the REASON there is an autumn strewn amongst the other three seasons!
How can one even describe the merits of a well-made pumpkin pie?
For one thing, it is so…. pumpkinny and all.
So cinnamonny and nutmegetty-ish.
Spicy, and just the right amount of mushy.
So good with coffee.
It’s just got everything going on.
It’s just so good it makes me want to seriously kick old people in the shins.

I’ve got pumpkin on the mind because right now I am sitting here in a Starbucks, and I am eating a gi-normo slab of their trademark October Pumpkin Cheesecake© .
It is heavenly good. Really. I’ve got maybe two forkfuls of it left on the plate.
And every morsel of it is being chased down with a sip of the best damn coffee this side of the Rio Grande. This is living. It really is.
OK. Last forkful, right here. Going down. A sip of coffee.
I’ve gotta go.
There’s an old guy, just sitting there, three tables down….

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Technical Issues...

Hmmm.
Just a question I would like to toss out to fellow users of BLOGGER.
Has anyone out there updated their blogger site to the new "Beta Blogger" that is being offered in a "pop-up" sort of feature every time I post a new blog?
If so, was it beneficial? Is there a problem with any data being lost in translation?
I am sort of paranoid about doing the switchover, and yet.... I am more curious than ten cats in a bag!
At one point I proceeded to switch over [can one save their current front-page appearance template?] and a warning sign came up, declaring basically that from that point forward there was no return to the good ol' days.
There is no way back to Kansas!
So I quit.... proceeding.
I can't help it, I am a cautious individual!
Any suggestions and/or testimonials from braver people than myself, yea, to the BETA-PIONEERS out there, would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
-- Cip

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Angela's Ashes

Just tonight I picked up Alice Munro’s hot-off-the-presses book of short stories, [The View From Castle Rock] and read the first one. It is terrific writing, and really memoir-ish. Having recently read Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder, I note that both of these veteran authors have come out in 2006 with very memoir-laden fictive reminiscive-ish stuff.
In the Foreword, Munro sort of explains what she is doing here... "These are stories.
You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative. With these developments the two streams came close enough together that they seemed to me meant to flow in one channel, as they do in this book."
And also, she tells us she will be "...exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality."
Of course, I note all of this here, so that James Frey can take note of such definitiveness!
Reading the first Munro story tonight reminded me of perhaps one of my favorite memoirs I have ever read. Frank McCourt’s, Angela’s Ashes.

Charles Dickens once said, "In the little world in which children have their existence, whoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only a small injustice the child can be exposed to; but the child is small; and its world is small."
Angela's Ashes amounts to a brilliant recollection of childhood injustice which is indeed... LARGE!
As I read the book, I was appalled at the depth of poverty that Frank McCourt and his family endured, and yet, I can't count the number of times I actually laughed out loud at the way in which the story is told. I've never read anything so simultaneously light and weighty. McCourt is witty, and is always in character, and that character is the child who was an eye-witness to every event. (An intriguing, fiercely narrative writing style is consistent throughout the book. ie., there are never any quotation marks).
The story is a powerfully moving disclosure of the perils of alcoholism.
If Frank’s father could have just walked PAST a pub even once without going inside and spending every cent he earned or borrowed that day…. well, it would constitute a miracle! His dissolution put the family in a state of destitution. The amazing thing, to me, is that he spent that precious money so shamelessly. Mother and children practically starve while dad staggers home in a drunken stupor night after night. Frank says of his father's false promises... "He'll give us a nickel for ice cream if we promise to die for Ireland and we promise but we never get the nickel."
Injustice.

In my opinion, the redeeming majesty of this memoir is that through it we learn a wondrous fact... that shamelessness, irresponsibility, and stupidity do not necessarily have to be handed down to the next generation.
Frank broke the mold, and chose self-awareness as his aspiration. I believe that the crucial turning point in his life came when, at the age of eleven he was convalescing at a hospital and came to the conclusion that "it's lovely to know the world can't interfere with the inside of your head." As readers of Angela's Ashes, we become the grateful recipients of this precocious revelation.

Mr. McCourt has received much recognition for his book, and all of it is deserved. I have no idea what he has gained monetarily from its publication, but somehow I think it's a bit more than his aforesaid promised nickel. Way to go. You are an inspiration to the world.

I have his follow-up, ‘Tis, sitting right here, brand-new like, on my shelf?
Why have I not read it yet?
Umm.... I'm too drunk!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) –

Thank you Sam. I myself cannot recall even one weekday in the past 95 years when I actually wanted to get out of bed when the alarm clock told me I had to do so!
Including today! Having said that…

Have a great Thursday!