Hiatus: noun -- pause, break, gap, lacuna, interval, intermission, interlude, interruption, suspension, lull, respite, time out, time off, recess; informal breather, letup.
I am so thankful that I have many great friends and fellow bloggers that tune in to Bookpuddle now and then, but lately you have probably been disappointed in the lack of postings.
I hate the thought of not blogging, but it's probably time I address the issue and just say that I'm experiencing a bit of lack of inspiration lately and I think I just ought to more fully attend to a few other things that need to take precedence right now. And once that stuff is sorted out, I'll be back here.
It happens to all of us from time to time I think, so please be patient with me as the thought of people reading what I have to say is very important to me.
But, as that great philosopher Play-Doh© once said -- Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
For now I shall be on hiatus until I become [somewhat] wise again.
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“...I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before?”
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall -- Have a great Wednesday!*****
Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
-- Gloria Steinem –
Have a great Monday!
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Have a great Friday!
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Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
-- Michel de Montaigne --Have a great Thursday!*****
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 --
Have a great Wednesday!
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I discovered a real neat blog-meme over at Diane's excellent book blog, Bibliophile By The Sea.
She calls it First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros.
I guess the idea is to show the beginning of the book you are reading, or are about to read next in line. By the way, you know you are a true "Bibliophile" [whether you are "By The Sea" or not] if you are already thinking ahead to your next book! This is my theory. And I am always doing this. I'll be reading a book, and already scanning my shelves, to see what I will be tearing into next.
Since I am right now reading a book about a pivotal year in the life of Shakespeare, I thought it might be the perfect occasion to go a bit further back in time, re-visit Tudor England, and finally dig into Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-Winning book, Wolf Hall.
Here is the first paragraph of the book:
'So now get up.'
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Have you read this one? What do you think? Would you keep reading, based on that first paragraph?
Visit Diane's blog-meme [and join in] by clicking on the image at the top of my blog.
By the way, that's her image, and I hope she doesn't mind that I purloined it!
Purloined!
See how reading about Shakespeare will affect your vocabulary?
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Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.
-- Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Have a great Monday!
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I just love discovering some of the mind-boggling scientific facts about our universe. Especially when they are explained with respect to things that we can observe and know about -- in the sense of comparisons. Something to put it in perspective! That way we can better try to understand the magnitude of what is "out there".
I saw this YouTube video about the size of a few others "suns" that exist in the known universe, blazing away even now. And it was so astounding I have to share it with you. I imagine some sort of aliens tanning on a beach a few zillion light years AWAY from that last sun mentioned. WOW! Can you imagine the SPF-factor needed?
It only will take a minute to watch this video clip -- so -- DO IT!
I may have forgotten how to BLOG, but at least I still know how to read.
In the past month I've managed to read five books, even though for one week of July I never read a single page of anything because I was entertaining guests at my place -- a time I would not have traded for any amount of books, by the way.
But I thought I would drop in to the Puddle tonight and inform anyone who may have been wondering if I was alive at all -- that yes, I am still breathing. Let me say the briefest of words regarding my impression of each of these books.
A Student of Weather, by Elizabeth Hay.
I admit, I am partial to Elizabeth Hay because she lives in one of the best cities in the world. My own -- Ottawa, Canada. And this novel largely takes place right here. So often I knew the very streets her characters walked. It's the story of a girl named Norma Joyce Hardy, and I hope the author will forgive me for summarizing this excellent tale in so brief a synopsis as the following: The person you first fall in love with when you are very young [i.e., the one who takes your virginity] is not necessarily the one you should also remain [hopelessly] devoted to for the rest of your life. I savoured this book. It is a treasure. I've read four of Hay's books, and this one is my favourite. I highly recommend it to you.
Next, The Visible World, by Mark Slouka.
This is definitely one of those books that gets better as you read it. At first I was a bit disappointed, but in the end, oh yes, it proves itself worthwhile. Growing up in New York, our protagonist becomes aware that his mother had a love affair that rang a bit truer than the one she currently has with his own father. He discovers that she was involved in a revolution in Czechoslovakia, but for reasons I will not divulge here, as an adult he is unable to ask her about her past. So he revisits the homeland to search for clues about her earlier life and is stymied at every turn. The second half of the book is his fictional account of what took place in his mother's life -- and we, the reader, end up believing in it as much as he does. It is a gorgeous, but searing and sad-ending love story that will nevertheless make any reader appreciate the finer aspects of true love in their own life. Again, I recommend it with very little reservation.
Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick.
The author has built a really wonderful tale around the simplest of premises. A truly obnoxious and arrogant [and lazy] brother coerces his sister to leave America and go to Paris to find his estranged son [her nephew]. Aunt Bea does it, and becomes embroiled in an endless amount of subterfuge and duplicity as she increasingly sympathizes with the reasons that the lad has flown the parental coop in the first place. She becomes a bit over-involved, let's just say. It's wonderfully written, and has made me want to read other things by this writer. When it comes to "family matters", Foreign Bodies will cause the reader to speculate upon the question of how appropriate it is to stick one's nose into [what amounts to] other people's business.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories, by Raymond Carver.
I am not going to have a lot of good things to say about this collection. Mind you, I am not really a proficient [and definitely not a prolific] reader of short stories, in general. So maybe I don't know beans about it. For my taste, I just thought these stories were a bit too ambiguous. Too often they seemed as if they were displaced chapters of a greater book. And the endings left me saying, "What?" As in, "the hell?"
I appreciate a good vignette now and then, but Carver lost me too often with his abrupt endings. Not fleshed-out enough for me. I'm all for "Hemingwayesque" when it comes to simplicity and abbreviated dialogue and all that jazz, but I'm afraid these stories did not at all grab me as they probably might enthrall another reader who likes to fill in the blanks.
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes.
Now here is a book I can heartily endorse sans regret. 163 pages? Really? It felt like a story that another author would have had to take 400 to tell. The conciseness is baffling. Told in first person, Tony Webster sort of reviews his entire life -- his college life, his loves and losses. And the strength of the book is the universal [we all can relate] philosophy laced throughout, with not the slightest trace of pedantry. My second Barnes book, but definitely not my last. I thoroughly recommend your grubby little hands on it.
So this has been just a few words about the past few things I have read.
Please forgive me my lack of blogging lately.
It is a hot, humid summer here, and I work in a building that does not have air conditioning.
Need I say more?
I myself am thinking of writing a memoir entitled The Stench of [Every Weekday's] Ending!
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My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
-- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet --
Have a great Thursday!
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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
-- Christopher Hitchens --
Have a great Wednesday!
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When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.
-- Philippa Gregory, The Other Queen --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Have a great Friday!
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No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.
-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness --
Have a great Thursday!
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For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out -- perhaps especially when it doesn't work out -- promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there's nothing like it, is there? Agreed?
-- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending --Have a great Monday!*****
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later... later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it's obvious why you did; if you don't, then the log of your journey is much less clear.
Just minutes ago I finished an amazing book, and the above citation is taken from it.
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes.
I think it is a work of genius. Of a genius, for sure But also, of genius.
And by that I mean it speaks to anyone who has ever seriously thought of what it means to be afforded just one life to live. Rather than review it -- I want to focus on the above passage, and pretty much every page is laced with similar thought-provoking philosophical musings for the thinking reader out there [which I know you all are!]
When we are young, it's a given that we pretty much already know everything.
But with each passing decade we learn [or should learn] that we really do not know diddly squat.
I am about to turn fifty, and so let me say that it is only recently that I've begun to fully contemplate the reality of the fact that we only go through this thing [life] once. The assessment of victories and failures is not the only thing that begins to run through the mind and heart, and one thing emerges as the clearest of all -- and that is that memory has taken on a whole new meaning.
Retrospection becomes the key that can potentially unlock whether there will be any sense to our ending. To leave it [life] without too many regrets becomes of increasing importance.
When we are young, there is no time for such thinking because the conception is that everything is not only still possible, but has already happened.
Thing is, it hasn't.
Happened.
And the reality is that with each passing year [never mind decade] mistakes become ever more irreversible. Yet these struggles, the things we learn along the way, are the very stepping stones to life-maturity -- if we accept the tutelage of it all.
In his analogy of the "black box" Barnes said, "If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself" and that is true -- but it is only with age, with time, that one realizes the importance of the tape itself. The thing is, in most lives -- there have been too many times when the data from that black box has not been properly retrieved, or if so -- the information arrives too late in the game. Turned off before we hear it.
A life lived to its fullest is one in which more has been learned from mistakes than from successes.
Crises are an essential part of life, of living -- and often they are meant to get us to rewind the tape, and listen closely to everything that has taken place. Good mingled with bad. The best ending one in which the headphones are never thrown from the ears. We can choose to not listen, but we will then suffer the consequences of never knowing why what happened, happened.
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I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
-- Frank Sinatra --Have a great Friday!*****
Have a great Thursday!
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