Honored.

Well, not to be overly morbid on a nice sunny Saturday afternoon, but I just received a phone call that was sort of interesting [to me]. I am about to inflict its details upon you...

A friend of mine is a pastor of a church. And this morning he officiated at a funeral, the circumstances of which involved a suicide. A funeral is pretty much always a serious and somber moment, but even moreso is this the case when the person whom everyone has gathered to remember, chose to take their own life. Standard eulogies, standard all-purpose anecdotal stuff does not really translate... everyone gathered knows that there is an element of grief present, a palpable untimeliness to it all that was not there when your 96-year old grandmother died of natural causes!

And so, not to belabor the point, but I think you can get what I am saying.
My friend, as you can imagine, was looking for the right things to say, at the right moments. At funerals, the officiating minister is trying to gather the scattered thoughts of those in attendance, and make of them something at least manageable, much as a person would gather 52 playing cards on a table, and pat them down, straighten them out, and then set them down as a pack, ready to be dealt out for the next game.
And so it was that at the interment service this very morning, there at the graveside, my friend recited a poem I had once written, back in 1995.
I wonder if it is wrong for me to feel honored.
Maybe honored is the wrong word, because it [the feeling I have] has very little to do with recognition. The truth is, no one there knows that I wrote it. It was merely read out, "as the writings of a friend."
No, I think it is in that anonymity itself that I feel honored.
Because it ensures merit where merit is due. In the words themselves. Like... in the fact that words can convey so much meaning, sometimes.
He told me that he could tell in those moments that people were moved, that the words reached into some of the ways they were feeling at that moment. Or perhaps, wanted to feel.
The poem is very brief, and can be seen here.
Have a great Saturday, all.
-- Cip

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Splash du Jour: Friday

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
-- Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish A Room –

Have a great, myth-making Friday!

FOLLOW YOUR BLISS!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.
-- Donna Tartt –

Have a great Thursday!

Something Fishy Goin' On....

[SERIOUS DISCLAIMER]:

The following blog-thing has absolutely nothing to do with books, nor is anything intelligent being said herein, furthermore, you will not be a better person for having read this particular blog-thing. Reading it will not impart any lasting value [moral, nutritional, or otherwise]. No dolphins were harmed in the creation of this blog-thing. [For those who may be interested, the Phantom Cat© walked across my bed again last night, I swear to God.] If you choose to read on, the author of this blog waives all lawsuits that may result from time wasted. In lieu of reading the thing any further, the Blog-Proprieter suggests you read a way more interesting piece, like this one entitled Some Penises of Things. Having said all of this, he would now draw your attention to the following freakish photo:


OK, that is a fish that has only one head and yet has two bodies.
It was caught near North Bay, Ontario.
I thought I had seen everything, but apparently..... not!
It merits an ode.....

The Dual-Bodied Pike.

A greater mystery I'd never heard
Though The Phantom Cat comes close.
Three fishermen fell overburd
Yelling, "Damn that thing looks gross!"

A legend was born that very day
'Round the campfire by the brook.
'Bout two tails that tried to swim away
After one mouth bit the hook!

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
-- Cicero –
[Note: I basically agree with this statement. However, I would add one more thing. → Hamburgers. As in, “If you have a garden and a library and some hamburgers, you have everything you need.”]
-- Cipriano –

Have a great Wednesday!

The Phantom Cat

Hi y’all. I’ve been meaning to write a sort of review of my time at the Roger Waters concert, but honestly, time eludes me. Since sobering up, I really have not had any free moments to write about that glorious eve!
I shall. I will. I promise.
But firstly, I must speak briefly of something that has been happening to me every night when I lay in bed and try to fall asleep.
Have I got your attention now?
OK…. this is a mystery, and I am wondering if any of you cat owners out there can reassure me that I am not losing my marbles.
Personally, I am not excluding [at this point] the possibility that I am simply going mental.
Here is what happens.
When I finally get in bed at night and get all comfy, usually, minutes later, my cat Jack [shown here] jumps up on either of the endtables and gingerly makes his way over to me. You may be able to picture what I mean…. he walks so carefully it is as if he does not want to awaken me, although I am not yet asleep. Then he usually crouches down and sleeps rather near to my face.
Lately, however, he has not been doing this. And I am not sure why. Yet, in the morning, there he is, down at my feet in the nether regions of the bed.
Thing is, for the past few weeks, as I lay there each night I swear that I can feel him walking across the bed and the pillows, and when I turn to look, he is not there.
It is like….. like a ghost cat is walking towards me. The phantom cat.
[Don’t laugh].
It is really bugging me.
And never was it worse than last night.
I was laying there as I do, on my side. Then the phantom cat arrived. Behind me, I felt him gently walk onto the bed, from the endtable. This time I was not going to be duped. So I waited.
Yep, I lay there and said to myself, “OK, is that the sense of the mattress actually indenting under the weight of his paws? Is that the blanket actually feeling like it is moving against the back of my neck, because Jack is kneading it like he does? Am I imagining this? NO. I am not imagining a damn thing. It is real. When I turn my head, he will be there. This time for sure he….”

He wasn’t there!
And I turned around like really fast.
It’s not as though Jack jumped off the bed, so please don’t tell me he was there and he jumped off the bed before I could see him do it because that is not a valid explanation. For one thing, there is no reason for Jack to be that jumpy. We’ve been calmly sleeping together for years! And don’t try and tell me it is the after-effects of breathing the fumes at the Waters concert [which admittedly, were quite hallucinatory!] The phantom cat has been visiting me long before I got peripherally stoned at that concert.

Please, can anyone let me know if you have ever experienced the phantom cat?
If so, did the remedy involve an exorcist?
It’s like I swear to God there is a ghost cat that gets in my bed every night.
And for all I know, it is the reason that the real live cat [Jack] is keeping his distance.

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

“Recently I eavesdropped on a conversation between two twenty-something employees at a local Starbucks. I listened as the barista mused about his taste in music. Then the cashier asked him if he had ever heard the song Strawberry Fields Forever. After a pause, the barista answered, ‘No, can’t say I ever heard that one before.’ That’s when I knew there really was such a thing as a generation gap.”
-- Mary Chapin Carpenter –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Is it really Monday morning?
After four glorious days away from work?
"Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!"
-- Biff, to Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman –

Have a great Monday!

Letter To A Christian Nation

One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns -- about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering -- in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.
-- Sam Harris, in Letter To A Christian Nation --

Well, I know I should be writing about the Roger Waters concert, right?
But I can’t do it just yet.
Perhaps it is still too holy of a moment for me to properly regurgitate all that this evening meant to me. I will try to write a bit about it tomorrow. It will have to suffice, for now, to leave you with the report that it exceeded my expectations. It was OVER THE TOP, good!
For now though, I am reeling over this book that I read today.
It is the new one from Sam Harris, Letter To A Christian Nation.

I have never read anything that spoke so directly, and so succinctly, to the issue of the dangers inherent in the current religious faith of our day. In short, we are in a real shemozzle! I sat down with it, and did not get up out of my chair until I had read every page.
It is indeed, a letter, addressed to the Christian “in the narrow sense of the term.” →Those who believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that only those who accept the divinity of Christ will be saved.
Since the publication of his first book, entitled The End of Faith, Harris has received thousands of letters from readers who feel compelled to warn him of the peril of being an atheist. This letter is his response.
Fascinating stuff. I was spellbound.
And I myself am not an atheist. I am what I would call an LBHA. [Lapsed-believer/half-agnostic.]
But from start to finish I believe that every topic that Harris touches upon here, ought to be brought fully into the realm of Christian discussion.
During a survey of The Ten Commandments, Harris raises the issue of what “real morality” is. He says that it always involves “questions about happiness and suffering.” How sad that at 42 years old, this tidbit should constitute a profound insight to me! He points out [for instance] that the first four of the Ten Commandments have “nothing whatsoever to do with morality.” [p.20]
He then moves to discuss prevalent Christian attitudes toward sex, abortion, stem-cell research, distribution of wealth, infant mortality, evolution, disaster [theodicy], prophecy, and offers a glimpse into where our discordant religious certainties are leading us, on a global scale.
It is ominous. Really.

See, Harris is writing this thing to the committed Christian out there. And at the end he is saying [basically]: Listen. I don’t mean to make light of the fact that your religious experience is very important to you. It has probably coincided with some positive changes in your life. That is a good thing, perhaps.
But… but… but… BUT, "It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis." [p.89-90]
According to Harris, we should conclude that we cannot conclude very much, based on faith alone. That what may have been “a necessary function for us in the past” may now be “the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.” [p.91]
I fully concur.

What a terrific, monumentously important, timely, little book!
GET IT!

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Well, I am preoccupied with today’s events.
So much so, that I cannot come up with a good literary, bookish, Splash du jour.
No, all I am thinking about is that in less than eleven hours I will be AT this concert which I have patiently waited for, for so long.
Roger Waters.
Montreal.
TONIGHT! 8:00 p.m. EST.
I am leaving soon…. skipping work. To be there.
The Bookpuddle blog may be empty for a while, as a result of my…. recuperation!
Shine on -- you crazy diamonds!
-- Cipriano.

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
-- Ernest Hemingway –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

"Writers aren't people exactly.
Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people
trying so hard to be one person. . ."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald –

Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Bored of the Flies

I have been experiencing a manifestation of fruit flies in my car.
It is very annoying, and has been going on for about five days or so. But I [hopefully] put an end to it, today.
Lately, every time I get in the car a little swarm of fruit flies start swirling around.
I thought they were coming through the vents. It’s enough to make you want to drive into the nearest bridge abutment, I swear!
And I mean…. → “I swear!”
So, of course, I checked under the seats. I checked under the mats, everywhere. No sign of their hotel! No little footprints. No tiny beer bottles strewn about. No sign of campfire…
Until today.
I was going to give a co-worker a ride to his bus-stop, and as he was getting in my car I said, “Now, don’t freak out. But when we get in there, a bunch of little flies are going to go mental.”
As he opened the passenger door he said “Look, you idiot!” and pointed to the one place I had not thoroughly searched.
A little place between the seat and the door.
And there it was. A mummified plum. Or something.
And flies. Flies in a state of heavenly bliss.
So of course, I cleaned up the mess. There’s now only a few stragglers left behind. They will probably eat each other and then the strongest and most vicious among their herd will die a lingering death, trying to eat the dashboard. GOOD!
OK, so part of the mystery is now solved. I had dropped some sort of fruit-thing on the floor somehow, or one of my passengers did. Fine.
But as I drove away and came here to Starbucks, my logician’s mind began to ask the inevitable, deeper questions.
Like...
1) How did a fruit fly find out about this? Where was this fly in the first place? Driving around with me for the last few years, hoping I would throw a plum his way?
I don’t get it.
But secondly…
2) How did all the others find out about it? I mean, I lock my car doors at night! There’s no way that that one fly could have gotten out and told a pile of friends, even. Much less, SO MANY friends.
And I’ve been killing them for days.
How is this fly population replenished?
After gorging themselves, have they been spending the last four or five nights in MY BACK SEAT? So to say?

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Splash du Jour: Monday

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
-- Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream –

Have a great Monday!

A Quiverful of Spears

As many of the more astute among you will know, I am moving through this Greenblatt bio of Shakespeare at the usual snail’s pace.
What can I say though, good things deserve to be savored.
Like that Fountain-Moment© I had at Niagara Falls [see last photo of the blog, just south of this one]… you want some moments to never end!
So today’s reading in the Greenblatt was Chapter Eight, all about sonnetry.
The Sonnets.
Reminded me of a treasured book in the Bookpuddle Library I share here with my alcoholic cat, Jack. The book is called umm… Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Let me be very clear as to why I give this book a full Five Spears out of a possible Five Spears... it makes Wilburt’s sonnets readily accessible and/or understandable to the average common reader (which I consider myself to be). It is no exaggeration to say that this Arden version has become a treasure to me. I have loved Bill's sonnets ever since committing #116 (my favorite) to memory a few years ago, but I admit that many of them have left me with one profound thought at the end of the fourteenth line, and that thought is... "huh"?
It is truly a sad predicament to be left in such a state of ignorance when Shakespeare is ALWAYS saying something AWESOME! Let’s face it, the guy was a phenom!
On any given day, he could have eaten a bowl of alphabet soup and then randomly barfed better poetry than anyone has painstakingly written since his day!
And I am stupid. Even on my best days, quite dumb as hell.
So, this book has come closest to a complete cure for me, in my severe sonnet-ignorance.
I am now seldom (if ever) left in the dark by an obscure phrase, line, or context, because the notes on the opposing page are right there to help me through those exact points of difficulty.
Hence, I unreservedly recommend this affordably priced 3rd Series edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones to any and all sonnet lovers. Let it "give physic" to your ailment.
P.S. It begins with an excellent over 100 page introduction and follows the sonnets with an equally great exposition of "A Lover's Complaint".

Quit reading this and go order the thing HERE.

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GOOFpuddle©!

Have you ever had one of those days when you have like.... ZERO stuff to blog about?
So you resort to stuff that you would be better off not showing to the entire world?
Yeah, today is one of those days, for me. Or rather, nights! So, after drinking a gallon of turpentine, I thought I would show you a few scenes of the last time I was at Niagara Falls.
First, I sort of checked the place out.... familiarized myself, basically.


Then I thought it would be neat to try and stick my entire head INTO the Canadian side of the Falls, horizontally.

Then I did some LSD on Main Street...

Then I tried to ride a Harley-Davidson in an indoor environment....


Then I pretty much.... well.....

Then I said to myself.... I should never have posted this blog.

YOU HAVE HEREBY LOST ALL OF YOUR CREDIBILITY WITH US, CIPRIANO!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

And why is McDonald's still counting? This is really insecure, isn't it?
40 gillion, 80 million, zillion, billion, killion, tillion...
What is this?
Does it mean anything to anyone?
89 BILLION SOLD!
“O.K. I'll have one."
I would love to meet the chairman of the board of McDonald's...
Just to say to him: "Look, we all get it. You’ve sold a lotta hamburgers, whatever the hell the number is. Just put up a sign: 'McDonald's, we're doing very well!’
I don't need to hear about every goddamn one of them."
What is their ultimate goal? To have cows just surrendering voluntarily?
Showing up at the door: "We'd like to turn ourselves in."
"We see the sign... we realize we have very little chance out there."
"We'd like to be a 'Happy Meal' if that's at all possible."
-- Jerry Seinfeld –

Have a great Friday!

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The Dark Side

Howdy all.
Just sitting here at Starbucks [again] after work and thinking.
Thinking about next week, next Thursday, at this EXACT time even, I will be at the Roger Waters “Dark Side Of The Moon” concert in Montreal.
Some of you may recall my initial blabbage about this. It seems like I bought these tickets in a previous lifetime, so long have they been sitting here!
Roger Waters [Pink Floyd]… well, I guess it is just my favorite music ever in the world, and so I am going mental wishing that next Thursday was TONIGHT.
I can’t wait.
But it’s all I can do. Wait.
Have you ever anticipated a concert so much that it pretty much drove you nuts?
If so, please let me know, so I don’t feel so alone in this….

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

“If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack.”
-- Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, (4.2.109-11) –

Perhaps some definitions are in order… firstly, “potations” refers to the action of drinking something, esp. alcohol. And “sack” here is referring to “a dry white wine formerly imported into Britain from Spain and the Canary Islands.”
So basically, Shakespeare’s Falstaff [probably half-tanked at the time] is saying that it is important to teach one’s progeny how to be properly drunk.
Or, as another great English writer would put it, centuries later, and in much less poetic of terms….

"Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew."
-- Charles Dickens –

To which I say… “Here, here! Fill my bloody tankard!”

Have a great Thursday!

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The NEW Jim Cuddy

Well, tonight, just a few words about one of my favorite musical artists on the planet.
← Jim Cuddy.
He is listed in my "Favorite Music" of my Blogger Profile, under Blue Rodeo, the band in which he shares lead vocalist honors with another great songwriter, Greg Keelor.
I love Blue Rodeo, and I love Jim Cuddy.
Jim's first solo album, called All In Time [1998] is superb. And I am right this minute enjoying my inaugural spin through his brand new solo CD, called The Light That Guides You Home. It was just released in stores, yesterday! I am Johnny-on-the-spot!
Love it.
I could praise Jim Cuddy until six cows walked into my 14th story apartment, right off the balcony, chewing their cuddy!
So I won't belabor the point. He writes superb music. In a bit I'll show you how you can hear the new single. But here's my reason for writing...
Last night I talked about CanLit, and ended that blog entry by drawing attention to the fact that no one wants to sing about Canada.
Well...... Jim Cuddy is a royal exception to that rule, and I love him for it.
Already, in this first spin through the CD, I’ve compiled a sampling of Canadianisms© in the lyrics.
In the second song, Maybe Sometime, he says: "We followed the moon all the way to Golden [as in, Golden, British Columbia]... Slept outside til we were almost frozen / watching the sun come up over Lake Louise [as in, Alberta].
In Countrywide Soul, he praises his girl by saying, "I love your hair / smells like Rocky Mountain air / Like the big sky shining on a Winnipeg night [as in, Manitoba]. Then he says, “Listen to a band in a St. John’s bar [as in, Newfoundland] / Down by the water on a Halifax [Nova Scotia] shore.”
Mentions the “magic in the mushrooms of P.E.I.”
Then, in a song called Falling, he says, “I spent a little time out west / A year in Calgary…”

All of this to say that Jim Cuddy is really ruining my argument of last night.
That it is impossible to sing about Canada.
This CD is like a TOUR of the entire nation, from coast to coast!
So, I revise and add to my former points, by saying…. Canada has the best authors, best music, best beer, best cigarettes, AND best zippers!
You can hear the gorgeous song called “Pull Me Through,” if you go → HERE and click just under the image that appears on the left side of the screen.
Happy listening to ya, eh?

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