Splash du Jour: Friday

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
-- Mark Haddon –

Have a great Friday!

Lines: A Poem

Lines

Do not like ruled paper.
Give me the blank white page.
Do not want lines.
Much moreso do open spaces
Appeal to the thinker in me.
Would sooner write through them
Than on. The lines I mean.
Whiteness. So if I veer, I veer.
Untracked snow for highway.
It is cold to explore. To write
Is to make my own lines.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2006

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
-- Northrop Frye –

Have a great Thursday!

Mission of Mercy

So Eli and I are at work today.
Picture three very large warehouses, if you will. These are joined to each other by little doorways, ceilings are about 35 feet high, and two of the warehouses are filled with miles of steel racking [shelving] upon which sit thousands and thousands of boxes.
The third warehouse is even more exciting than these first two.
It is filled with pallets of boxes, no shelving.
I can guarantee you that if there existed any contest entitled, “Quest-For-The-Most-Boring-Three-Warehouses- Ever-To-Be-Joined-Together-By-Little-Doorways© ,” the place where I work would win, hands down.
So it is late afternoon and Eli and I are working in this place, in Warehouse #2, the middle one.
All of a sudden I hear a chirping sound, and a bird flies through the air, and I yell to Eli, “Look at the bird. Look at the bird.”
But by the time he looked up it was gone. These three seconds have been the most exciting of the entire day, and now they are over. [From 8 till 5, we seriously welcome any signs of outside life].
Soon the bird flies by, far above our heads. Chirping.
I say to Eli, “That poor thing is gonna die in this hellhole.” [I was secretly hoping that he might want to join with me in a rescue attempt.]
“Open the roll-up door,” he says, and so we begin our Mission of Mercy.
I roll up the door and the warehouse is flooded with avian-salvific light. However, the door does not stay up on its own [it’s busted] and because I have to hold it, my arms extended, the bird is scared and will not fly down and out.
So we decided to open the doors to the 3rd warehouse and see if the thing will fly in there [where the roll-up door actually works].
Soon the bird, a sparrow, is flying around in Warehouse #3, and I roll up the door to the blue sky outside.
Where does the bird decide to fly?
To the very extreme opposite end of the place!

So Eli and I start running around like lunatics, trying to shoo the thing out the door.
Each of us are actually giving the bird REASONS as to why it should seriously consider flying out the damn door!
Finally, it gives us one last look, and then, as if it was merely some sort of afterthought… as if it was wondering why we were in such an uproar over nothing, it swooped through the opening.
Free, free at last.
Eli and I let out a whoop and high-fived each other.
[Warehouse guys! They are easily excited!]

Story is not quite over.
Not even five minutes later, I am back in Warehouse #1, retrieving some orders from the computer.
I look up just as a bird flits past me, and again, is off on some kind of erratic flight path all over the least humanly-accessible regions.
I go over to the normal entrance door and open it. Light floods in.
But again, I have to hold the door open, it swings shut on its own, so the wary sparrow keeps swooping down, and then chickening out.
I peer in.
It peers out.
I talk to it.
It says nothing. Just tilts its head like they do.
So, I got behind the door. And just waited.
Soon [amazing how other living things have this innate fear of us, huh?]… the bird launched out on its flight of faith and was gone. Flew right past my head, and shot straight upwards, into the sky.

Now, here is the crazy thing.
I have worked at that boring building for over seven years. In all that time I have never encountered a trapped bird in the place.
But today…. twice?
It seems to me very strange. Very suspicious. I wonder if there is some message in it.
I needed to work off some bad karma? My “good deed” account was in bad shape, so Fate sent me two birds to rescue?
All I know is this. I think Eli and I did the right thing.
I think that our Mission of Mercy today will help us, I really do, if we ever find ourselves in purgatory.
It’s got to count for at least a few days grace!

[By the way, Eli did not believe me when I told him about the second bird.]

*************

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

That extraordinary writer of stories about the “Christ-haunted” American South, Flannery O’Connor, was frequently asked why her people and plots were so often outlandish, even grotesque.
She answered, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures.”

Have a great Tuesday!

A Fantastic 4-Footed Fable

The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius [ca.124 - ca.170 A.D.]
What a great book.
I thought only cats were supposed to have nine lives, but this donkey has at least that many.
This book is great fun, I couldn't put it down for too long, and it is incredible that something written so long ago (18 centuries) can be so accessible, captivating, and hilarious to a modern reader. The events in The Golden Ass resemble the ribald, bawdy exuberance of The Decameron, and no doubt Boccaccio was somewhat inspired by the writings of Apuleius. [As was Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses].
According to the introduction, the adjective "golden" in the title implies "the ass par excellence," or "the best of all stories about an ass." The story follows the misadventures of Lucius, an enterprising young man who gets far too close to the world of magic, is transformed into a donkey and is constantly thwarted in his attempt to procure the antidote to his assness. It's human mind trapped in donkey bawdy! He had intended to become an owl, as his girlfriend did before him. Together they would then escape the city, and be together… but he drinks the wrong potion and then spends the whole novel trying to transmorgrify into something more decent than an ass.
Totally imaginative, classically written, hilarious fun. As a writer, Apuleius was literally MILLENNIUMS ahead of his time!
[NOTE: There are several translations available. I read the Robert Graves one, as shown here.]

Judith: A Classic...

Brian Moore is one of my favorite novelists of all time.
I would guesstimate [is that a word? If it isn't, it should be...] I've read a dozen or so, of his novels. He was an amazing [Irish/Canadian] author.
Tonight I am re-thinking his 1955 book, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
After cranking out a string of pot-boiler thrillers, Judith Hearne was Moore's debut venture into the world of the serious novel. Here he sought to depict the epic, cosmic conflicts that are under the surface of the most seemingly ordinary of lives. He set it squarely in 1950's Belfast, where he was raised as one of the Catholic minority. He hated Belfast, calling it a "claustrophobic, provincial backwater... trapped in the nightmare of history" and plagued equally with Protestant self-righteousness and Catholic repressiveness. All of these sentiments find their way into this, his first literary novel.
Judith, convent-raised, unmarried, and forty-something, moves into Mrs. Rice's boarding house on Camden Street. It is her sixth relocation in the last few years. [We find out why later.]
She teaches piano and embroidery to an ever diminishing handful of students, has very few possessions, and fewer social attachments. In fact, her only social involvement is tea with the O'Neill family on Sunday afternoons. Only later do we find how one-sided even this relationship is. The O'Neills secretly dread her visits.
We are soon to sense the brooding cloud of narrowness, plainness, loneliness, and ignorance that hovers over this poor soul. Moore captures it. Even her physical frame, he says, is "plain as a cheap clothes rack."
To sustain herself she lives in a world of religious faith and imagination... or illusion. She daydreams, and surrounds herself with iconic totems from her uneventful past. And she has a secret vice that isn't revealed until almost midway in the novel. She's a(n) _____! (I won't say).
The novel revolves around Judith's interactions with the many other residents of Mrs. Rice's home. Because of Judith's long repressed desires and vivid imagination, she is quick to assume that Mr. Madden's attentions will lead to a splendid marriage. But in their mutually illusive worlds they are both nursing dissimilar motives as regards each other. And meanwhile, Judith is being horribly set up for a total spiritual/emotional breakdown by a certain nefarious Iago-like presence in the home. As a result of her mounting disappointments she questions (abandons?) her religious faith, and is led in increasing measure to wallow in her secret vice... the real "passion" of Judith Hearne. And it is indeed, partaken in abject loneliness. Even the Church, represented by the tactless Father Quigley, rejects her cry for help. He heaps penitence and guilt where forgiveness and grace are needed.
This novel is brilliant in its portrayal of a woman at the very outer limits of disillusionment. Trapped by the passage of time.
In the end, she looks in the mirror and smiles a costly smile. It has cost her the illusion, the pretence, and the ill-founded faith of all her years.

********

Splash du Jour: Friday

Today is the birthday of a truly great man. The English poet, artist, designer, typographer and socialist, William Morris.
(1834-1896).
His fantasy tale The Well At The World’s End is one of the best stories I have ever read.
Morris was amazingly gifted, and possessed such a wide range of talents. His exquisite artistry knew no bounds. To the left is one of his tapestry designs. He created furniture, designed books, wallpapers, stained glass, weavings of every imagination. He celebrated “beauty for its own sake.”

Morris said:
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.
-- William Morris –

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
-- Northrop Frye –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) –

Have a great Wednesday!

Each chapter, a life.

The book is Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries. Edited by Laurel Holliday.
It is a chilling, moving, important account of 23 youth and youngsters trying to understand the hatred and violence that engulfs their previously peaceful lives. The average age of the writers is around 13-14 years.
For many of these children, these excerpts represent their final plea to the surviving world, fully understanding that they will not be a part of that world. Writing became their last and sometimes only form of resistance.
I found the very last entry of the unknown brother and sister in the Lodz ghetto to be especially moving. Without access to any other paper, the boy scrawled his diary entries into the margins of an old French novel. After the war was over, a next door neighbor returned to the wreckage of the house, and found the book with the boy's notes in it.
If any one of us actually knew any one of those who wrote these diaries... if any one of them were a member of our own families, we would naturally value even one of their retrieved pages far above all of the other books we own, would we not?

Well, as I read this book I realized many times that just because I did not personally know any of these children does not really diminish the inherent importance of any one of their pages... these children were all known and loved by their own families and friends. They should have been loved by those who were then acting as their mortal enemies, but sadly, they were not.
Some of these entries depict deprivations and describe atrocities that are near impossible for most of us today to imagine.
Some would avoid the book on account of this, and that is understandable. We can go to horror novels to be deliberately horrified in a fictional sense, but it seems morbid to turn to non-fiction for the same results.
But we must remember that we do not read non-fiction for the same reasons that we read fiction. We read non-fiction, not to dwell on or glory in horror, but to LEARN something about ourselves and others. There is an old saying, "To dwell on history is to lose an eye; to ignore it is to lose both of them."
Laurel Holliday has here edited a book which should not be ignored.

************

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
-- C.S. Lewis –

Have a great Tuesday!

Just speakin' my mind...

Hey, can we talk?
My human here, he's got this new blogpage.
I know, he has already told most of you about it, but see, he walks around here and mumbles stuff... something like he thinks no one sort of seen his previous advertisment and whatever, so, I've pretty much had enough of it.
I'm not kiddin' ya.
The guy is making me hack up!
I've had to take matters into my own paws, as it were!
Go visit his other page.
It's called godpuddle, of all things.
It's about some sort of spiritual razamatazz malarkey.
Pretty much a big waste of time... but HUMOR him. [It's what I do all the time, he buys it!]
Just pop in over there and maybe I can get sleep, if he ever shuts up about it already....

Thank you,
Jack Ragdoll

Splash du Jour: Monday

... Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?...
-- Blaise Pascal, Pensées 293,294 --

Have a great Monday!

Stainage!

Today, actually by the end of today, after thinking about this a bit more, I want to arrive at one of the two following conclusions. Either:

1) I wash my clothes way too much.
OR
2) Other people do not wash theirs enough.

See, here is the thing. I am sitting at Starbucks and observing a constant flow of humanity around me. Including people out on the street. But let’s stay indoors, and focus on those that have come in from the cold, for a cup of coffee.
Are you with me?
OK, I have noticed this, [the thing I am going to describe for you now], I have noticed it for YEARS, it’s not that I just discovered it today or anything, but finally I am going to write about it.

Salt stains.
I understand “salt stainage” in general, I do. In the wintertime, the roads are all salted up by our way overpaid municipal folks to melt the snow and ice, it’s all about tire traction!
Occasionally, one’s shoes may get a bit stained up, white with what looks like calcium deposit or something. Like your shoes have a milk mustache.
OK, THAT I totally understand. When I notice it on any of my shoes, I pretty much clean it up immediately, because it looks sort of grody. Am I right?
But, will someone please explain to me how people can walk around with salt stains halfway up their pants?
Like all over the bottom half of their jeans, almost to the knee at times?
It is absolutely incredible.
And they are everywhere, I’ve just seen a whole bunch of examples of it walking around here.
I am not even talking about salt stains down around the ankle area.
No, that would be quite minor.
I am referring to the higher-up type of heavy-duty ADVANCED stainage!

My question is this.
Where in the hell are these people walking?
Are they deliberately wading through some sort of salt pits on their way here?
Is there some special area where people go to receive these stains? On purpose, like?
How can they even possibly get salt stains up that high?

I walk around in the downtown area almost constantly, winter and springtime…. slush season… I am out there, and never in my lifetime have I ever gotten salt stains all over my jeans like this.
But if I did…. if I DID somehow get my pants all salt-stained, I would immediately WASH THEM!
[Now I am ready to introduce the second phase of my consternation…]

Today is an absolutely freezing day.
Point being, THERE IS NO SLUSH!
The roads are not even being salted today!
Today is slushless!
This can mean only one thing.
The people I am observing today have all received their salt stainage long ago! Like, way on OTHER DAYS, and it is obvious from some of the sedimentary layers and variant levels of multiple stainage evidence, that they’ve been stained repeatedly, on different days.
Then, the persons have gone on to wear the same clothes without washing them.
The realization of this is sort of boggling my mind here.

I myself, if even a drop of coffee accidentally falls onto my lap, I wash those jeans before wearing them again.
And yet, here are people, casually walking around, with enough grimy sodium on their clothing to cure a side of pork!

I simply do not understand.
My conclusion is pending…

************

Splash du Jour: Friday

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
-- The character Mary Bennett in Jane Austen’s, Pride and Prejudice –

Have a great Friday!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

That lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book Lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines-not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.
-- Robertson Davies –

Have a great Thursday!

Essential Reading

I have just finished a magnificently good novel.
The Child In Time, by Ian McEwan. It’s the seventh McEwan book I have read and he never ceases to amaze me, but this one was exceptionally good.
It is a story that works on so many levels… overall it is somewhat of a psychological-thriller/love-romance thing. It is bracketed with intensely fever-pitch emotionally charged opening and closing chapters, with some really magical magical realism interspersed throughout the body of the story.
Stephen Lewis is a writer of children’s books. Successful. Happily married. Tickety-boo!
One sunny morning he trots off to the supermarket with his three-year old daughter, Kate. Later, at the checkout line, in a flash, in an instant, she is gone.
Vanished.
[Don’t worry, I will say no more along these lines… will not spoil the story for you, but even the jacket-blurb will tell you as much as I have just revealed….]
This is only Chapter One!
I have rarely read anything so real. So vividly drawn my heart raced, I was frantic, and I am not even the parent of a child.
What will happen to Stephen’s marriage as a result of this loss? Or to his career as a writer? How will Stephen and his wife Julie cope, as the Kateless years begin to unravel around them?
Will Kate ever be found? The possibilities are endless, and McEwan keeps the inner tension equally endless. It is amazing what McEwan is able to do with the last few pages of the book. [Don’t peek. DO NOT peek].
It is a hauntingly good read.
A journey to the very depths of profound grief. Rising towards hope.
You know how sometimes you finish a novel and you set it down and you are a bit underwhelmed, and you regret having spent that much time to be rewarded with just that final disappointed sigh? [Same thing happens at movies, when the credits start rolling and you stare at the screen and think “What?”]
Well, when I set down The Child In Time, just last evening, my thoughts were more like, “Wow! That was seriously gut-wrenchingly worthwhile.”
This is one of his best.
McEwan is definitely one of the very best authors out there.

***********

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed....
No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
-- Eugene Field, Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”

-- Steve Jobs, Apple and Pixar CEO –

“Being the poorest man in the cemetery will probably be my lot. Going to bed at night and dreaming of being able to afford my next Mac laptop, that’s what matters to me.”
-- Cipriano, Bookpuddle CEO –

Have a great Tuesday!