Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!
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Emmanations...

I am still hyperventilating over a letter [an email] I received from Emma Donoghue.
← This is Emma. She is one of my favorite contemporary authors. Her work is exquisite, and [in my opinion] not read by nearly enough readers out there. If you yourself have not read her, then that alone proves my point.
You are one Emma-less person too many!
I have read three of her novels, and I am so glad that there is a lot more of her work, yet to read.

OK, so here is what happened.
My reading partner and I [The Surfacing Reading Club. Very elite! Over 3 years old. Membership → A steady 2.]… we decided to write Emma Donoghue a letter, because truly, of the over 100 books we have read together, Emma’s books definitely stand out as like…. top ten stuff!
So we wrote this letter, and when I say “we” I really mean that the better half of the Club wrote the thing, and that half is not me. She is a far better writer than I.
But the tone and the gist of the letter might as well be the words of both of us.
We sent the letter snail-mail.
It was returned to us, undeliverable.
Next step.
Email.
BINGO!

Just yesterday we received an e-reply from Emma.
When I came home from work and opened up that email I nearly fell over.
It begins thusly… I usually fire off an immediate two-line thanks for the rare fan letters I get, but this one deserved a more considered reply. In fact it's the most wonderful fan letter I've ever received.
Hey! She had me at hello!
Now, I am not going to divulge any more pure Emma-ness with you, because… the whole thing is just too sacrosanct. It is holy. → SHE WROTE STUFF TO US!
All of that awesome good juicy stuff about the inner workings of Emma’s characters. Answers to questions we asked her. Stuff about fictional personages that are so real to the Surfacing Book Club that real actual people seem so incredibly drab you want to throw something at them!
So no.
I shall not share our private and holy Wondrous Emmanations with the gawking world!
But I will say this. Ms. Donoghue closes her letter by telling us that she is busy at work on her next novel. It will be called The Sealed Letter, and is based on an 1860’s divorce case.
The Surfacing Book Club© will DEFINITELY be reading that book!
And in the meantime, we'll be reading the other Emma books that we have not yet gotten to!
Vive l’Emma!

To learn more about Emma, click here.
And even here.

Also, I have written about Emma in previous blogs, like here, and here, and here, and here.

Gotta go and re-read her email to me.
Bye for now…..

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

-- John Lennon –

Have a great Tuesday!

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Splash du Jour: Monday

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
-- Rebecca Solnit –

I agree with Rebecca.
For my own whimsical/mythical take on blueness, click here.

Have a great Monday!

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A Few Must-NOT-Reads!

Well, I have had quite a weekend of not being around. Was not even near my computer at all, hence, no erudite and witty blogs to offer the world.
[Dear Bookpuddle: Does this mean that you are assuming that at other times you are erudite and witty? You should really take a poll on that.....!]
Hey!
Try being nice, for a change!
OK, so I have just gotten home, my cat is meowing his head off [at least someone loves me!] and I got to thinking...
[Hey Mildred, get over here.... this should be good...]
You know, so often people go on and on talking about their "Must-Read" List... books on the shelf, or on a pile, or on reserve at the library, waiting their turn to be read?
But no one ever says very much about books they HAVE NO INTENTION OF READING.
And so I thought it might be interesting to show you a few books I have absolutely no intention of ever reading, in my current lifetime....
First, this one.
Now seriously, I love a good sandwich as much as the next guy.... but dancing ones, hmmm. I don't know.
This one is #1 on my Must-NOT-Read list.

Next up is:Admittedly, it is a theory I have long held to be actually true, but.... other books I have read by this Fred Haley guy, they just weren't all that good. So this one is #2 on my list.

Then, there is, the infamous bestseller:

Sure.
That's all I need.
To learn how to cook food that is going to make me go BALD!
Not likely that I want to see this thing under the Christmas tree this year!

So there you have it.
What are some of your "Must-NOT-Reads"?
And yes, I mean... besides Bookpuddle?

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Whenever a writer puts out a thought, it can be disagreed with vigorously, vehemently, even violently. But it cannot be un-thought. That is the great, permanent gift a writer gives to the world.
-- Salman Rushdie --

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Today is the birthday of a truly great writer.
He once said:
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
-- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) –

Have a great Thursday!

MAC-update!

Some of you Avid Puddlers© [if I may be so arrogant to believe that such a species exists…]… some of ye may recall that back in January, my laptop PC breathed its last.
Went out, with a poof of over-heated dismay.
There was no smoke, except for the stuff coming out of my ears!
At that time, a friend of mine came to my rescue.
He was willing to sell me his 8-month old [hell, just a new-born…] MAC Power Book G4.

So, I thought that tonight I would give you a little MAC-update.
What is my current opinion of my decision back then?

MOST AWESOME COMPUTER-ISH THING I HAVE EVER DONE!

MY CONVERSION IS ABSOLUTE!

I cannot see myself ever owning a "regular" PC [laptop or otherwise] ever again. Not saying that won’t happen, but I am just saying it will happen against my will!
I’ve been fully MAC-ed!

The machine is superior, that is all there is to it.
And in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin.

I mean, the graphics are about 600 times nicer than my old e-machines© [God rest its e-soul] machine.
I am not a gamer, but what I am referring to is the flat-out graphics of the images I post on my blogs.
My God, viewing bookpuddle [or anyone else’s blog] on this MAC and then viewing the same pages in any non-MAC environment is like…. umm… the difference between lying on your back and looking at the sky, and…. umm, putting a pillowcase over your head, and then lying back and looking at the sky!
Yeah! That’s about it.

There are no over-heating issues. NONE!

No virus issues. NONE!

The iTunes program has revolutionized how I listen to music.

The friend who sold me this thing went and bought the new MacPro laptop, and he loves it. What can one say?
No wonder some people get their heads shaved, leaving only the Apple logo visible!

It’s my next scheduled act of Mac-devotion…..

BECOME A BELIEVER!
Wanna watch an amazing speech by Mr. Apple? [Steve Jobs]
When you get there click on "Watch the keynote address.”
Oh yes, and one more thingy…. to SEE it real good, you’ll have to running a Mac!

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Every man who amounts to a damn has several fathers, and the man who begat him in lust or drink or for a bet or even in the sweetness of honest love may not be the most important father. The fathers you choose for yourself are the significant ones.
-- The character Dunstan Ramsay, in Robertson Davies’, The Manticore –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I met her – my fiddle – in 1963. She is about 250 years old. She’s from Italy. She eats spaghetti. I am really nice to her. Because if I am not nice to her, she is not nice to me. It’s an attachment. She is never out of my sight.

-- Pinchas Zukerman –

Have a great Tuesday!
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The Reader

Patricia @ BookLust, recently posted a great blog about how she made a wheelbarrow-type used-book-haul on her Muskoka vacation. One of the books she snagged was Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

Reading her blog made me recall my own reading of the book.
I am a slow, methodical reader.
[No kidding! We’ve noticed! Your “Currently Reading” book images stay on your bookpuddle sidebar for like…. months at a time! When do you ever change it? Only on years when Halley’s Comet goes by?]
Hey! Be NICE!
But seriously, it's painfully true. I read slow.
For me to sit down and consume an entire novel in "one go" is something that is quite rare, but that is exactly what happened when I read The Reader.
It is a testament to the writer's ability to keep me entranced and involved with the story that once I started, I could not stop.
The Reader is a first person narration of the life, from fifteen years onward, of one Michael Berg, in post-war Germany. As a fifteen year old he meets the vivacious 36-year old Frau Schmitz (Hanna), and he will never be the same.
Everything about her affects him for a lifetime, in ways that he could never have imagined.
In short pithy chapters and an economic style that never bogs down, Schlink separates the major phases of Michael's involvement with Hanna into three Parts.
Part 1 is where we learn of Michael's sexual initiation and subsequent emotional attachment to Hanna. Serious page-flipping stuff!
In Part 2 we are drawn into a courtroom situation (Michael is a law student) in which he is as shocked as the reader (us) to learn of the horrific nature of Hanna's secrets.
Part 3 outlines the way in which Michael attempts to bury the past, as best he can. But it is not possible. It is not possible. Michael's past is exhumed. There were moments in this section that I found gut-wrenchingly sad, yet, presented in a beautiful way. (How does one say it?) It is brutal. Brutal sad and shockingly so.
I will not go into WHY the book is called The Reader.
That would be saying too much, I think.
I enjoyed this book. You will sink into it quickly. But not as though into quicksand.
You will walk away from it, perhaps with a heavy heart (that is one thing I should say. There is nothing humorous about this book)... your heart may be heavy afterwards, but only because it will carry the weight of knowing that there are beautiful things to be felt towards those who have done even the most atrocious things imaginable.
Love is love.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

You can have a good book that isn’t “successful” and doesn’t make a lot of money, you can have a bad book that isn’t successful and doesn’t make any money, you can have a good book that is successful and makes a lot of money, and you can have a bad book that is successful and makes a lot of money. There is no correlation between literary goodness and success and money. All you can do as a writer is try and respect the page. Try and respect the reader. Try and respect who is going to pick up that page. That page is all you have, that is your sole means of communication, so try and make that page as good as you can make it for where it is in the book. That’s all you can do.
-- Margaret Atwood –

Have a great Monday!

Disaster Averted

I am writing this about three minutes after the event itself.
It was just real cute, the kind of thing I love to see, and further proves my theory that:
#1) Starbucks is a great place to spend half your life, and
#2) Starbucks personnel are great people.
As many of you will know, I am quite the Starbucks groupie.
I can barely endure driving past the wavy-haired siren on that green sign without stopping and going in for an americano, or regular old “grande bold.”
As a Canadian, I know that I am supposed to be this way regarding Tim Horton’s, but no.
Truth is, I do not like Tim Horton’s [bitter-as-hell] coffee AT ALL!
How they command the attention of all Canadians is a mystery to me. What extra-terrestrial force is at the bottom of the appeal of Tim Horton’s… I know not! What sort of cosmic pact was signed with nefarious underworld deities… I don’t even want to know.
No.
Give me Starbucks©!

So here I am today, right now even, settling into my third or fourth hour of a Starbucks stint. Sitting at a corner table.
This guy [mid-30’s?] came in and ordered a coffee and a slab of rice-krispie cake. The coffee is for him, and the cake, for his little two-and-a-half-foot tall son. Cute as ten buttons → [The kid, not the tall guy].
They both then sat down on these two poofy-nice velvetty sofa-type chairs, just a few feet away from me. I kept on reading my book. [I am not quite as voyeuristic as this blog is sounding… but yes, I do tend to notice things around me].
The guy sets his coffee down on the little table between the chairs and takes the rice-krispie cake out of its little brown paper envelope. Hands it to his child.
For some unfathomable reason… the youngster waves the sticky piece of cake in the air and it flies right out of his little hand and skips along the floor. He chases it and picks it up about eight feet away and quickly examines it to determine its present state of edibility.
Dad is saying, “Daniel, do not eat that. Do not touch…. bring it back to Daddy.”
The boy toddles over, holding this hairy, dusty piece of cake up to his dad.
There is severe disappointment on his face as he gives up his treat.

“Sit down, son.”
The boy hoists himself back into the chair.
Dad stands up and is rooting around in his pocket for change, turns to go up to order another piece of cake.

But the entire time, from my vantage point, I could see that from the very moment the cake took flight the Starbucks barista-girl had gone into immediate disaster-recovery mode.
Without hesitation, she had reached into the glass case and removed another piece of cake. And now, as the man turned, there she was, bending down, and handing the envelope to the boy.

Disaster averted.

“Here you go,” she says.
He takes the crinkly package and looks inside.
“What do you say, Daniel?”
“Thank you,” he says, reaching in to the cake.
Dad also says “Thank you,” and moves toward the counter to pay for the cake but the girl stops him.
“No, no. No problem at all,” she assures him.

Just a little scene, I know.
Nothing that is necessarily going to change the entire world or anything.
But still, I may draw upon it tonight.
May want to recall it, as I sit and watch the evening news.

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Damn Good Poetry!

Good morning. Or afternoon.
Happy Saturday to you.

I like to read good poetry.
And write it.
Even poems about poetry.
Whether this one is good or bad, I know not.
I will leave that judgment to yourself.
The good reader.

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Splash du Jour: Friday

I think that these are some excellent words about success.
About maintaining a healthy perspective on achievement.
Think of it. → Marvin Hamlisch has won three Oscars, four Grammys, three Emmys, a Tony, three Golden Globes and a Pulitzer for songs such as “The Way We Were” and the Broadway musical The Goodbye Girl.
And he says:
“If you came to my apartment, you would not see the Oscar. The truth is, it’s really not about that. It’s really about wanting to do what you can do as well as you can do it for as long as you can do it… Yeah, the penny dropped when I got my three Oscars, but you know how long the penny drops for? You have a great evening, you’ve got all these people around you, you come home and you’ve got these three Oscars – which, by the way, you have to give back so they can put your name on them, which, by the way, you have to pay for – and then the next day, it’s basically business as usual, you get the twenty calls of congratulation and on you go.”
-- Marvin Hamlisch –

Love it!

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

There are two kinds of cigar smokers – patrician fellows, who look as though they had been born to smoke the finest Havana, and people like myself, who look like cannibals gnawing a finger from their latest victim. If one does not belong to the very small first class, one should smoke cigars in private; nothing makes a man look so degraded as a drool-soaked, tattered, burning stump of tobacco stuck in one corner of his mouth.
-- Robertson Davies, in Samuel Marchbank’s Almanack –

[You know what? I agree with him. On all points.]

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Ann-Marie MacDonald, speaking of her novel, Fall On Your Knees:
I spent five years on this book, and when I write something it’s like my child and, of course, I love it. And I want it to be a precious gift that I will give to the reader. I want the reader to feel like nobody wrote it, that it’s their own. Because that’s how I feel about my favorite books. I have an intimate relationship with them. And God knows, I don’t want to meet the author, so why anybody wants to meet the author is beyond me. It’s going to wreck it.
-- Ann-Marie MacDonald –

[I would really love to meet her!]

Have a great Wednesday!

Yellow!

So last night after work I was at the Mall.
I ate at my favorite place, the Bourbon Street Grill, then schmaltzed around there for a bit, had a coffee and read a bit.
Bought a button-up short-sleeved summer shirt. White with orange vertical stripes.
I know, I know… that’s not going to exactly get me on the cover of the next GQ or anything. But it made me feel cool, putting that shirt on. And by “cool” I mean… not hot.
Cold.
I looked sort of like a Creamsicle© .
Remember those things?
Creamsicles?

When I left the Mall I set out on the freeway, and while still on the on-ramp I noticed a small lump on the road, and drove over it.
Sort of like, “tha-whump-a.” [paraphrasing].
Totally committed to the freeway now… I thought about that glimpse of the lump, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a wallet.
A black wallet.
“Yep. That’s exactly what a wallet would sound like, if I drove over it.”

I took the next exit.
Then backtracked around about ten blocks, through the Mall parking lot again, and this time, as I approached the freeway again, I pulled over, got out, and retrieved what was, in fact, a man’s wallet.
Full of credit cards, driver’s license, medical card, calling card, all kinds of junk.
[No cash. Rats!]
So when I got home I called the number on the calling card.
No answer.
Looked in the phone book. This guy has a second phone number, same middle initial, in fact same address as the residence one. But here he is listed as a lawyer, in bolder print.
Hmmm…
I call the man’s law office and left a message…. “Umm, I just ran over your wallet on the freeway and it looks like at least 900 other people ran over it before I did, but my phone number is……”

About an hour later I get a call, and the guy wants to come over and pick up his wallet.
No probs. Give him directions to my place.
Soon he rings me up, and I take the elevator down to meet the man and his wife. He doesn’t even shake my hand.
Grabs the wallet from me.
His hands are shaking as he rifles through the thing.
Then he looks at me and says, “There is a credit card missing.”
Oooooh.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good thing to do,” I am now thinking to myself.
Good Samaritan, Good SHMARMARITAN!
All I want now is to get back up to my apartment.

What does this guy think?
I stole his ONE credit card and then figured I’d call him up to return the rest of them?
I say to the guy…. “Sir, I assure you. That is exactly as I found it. I touched nothing inside there except to find out your name and phone number.”
He said something like, “No, of course. Of course. OK.” Then added a mild “Thanks” and that was about it.
He hopped in his shiny red SUV and barrelled away.
I still do not know if his wallet was stolen or if it landed on the highway earlier, as his wife tried to maybe throw HIM out of the car!
It was strange.
If that was me…. if someone had returned all of those hard-to-replace items to me, voluntarily taken the time to rescue the wallet and all, I would have been much more effusive in my gratitude.
But what can I say?
I’m a real creamsicle of a guy.
And some other people… more like yellow ice-cubes on a stick.
Yellow.
If you know what I mean…

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Our freshman English teacher says that she can't finish Romeo and Juliet.
How afraid should I be?
-- an Illinois High School English Teacher –

My answer to her?
→“Methinks it doth not bode well.”
Should we worry?
→ “Hel noe! Knot yit innyway!”

Have a great Tuesday, y’all!

"One may as well begin..."

I noticed a real similarity in one aspect of a couple novels I recently read.
→ Opening lines.
First, there is this opening line in Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty:

One may as well begin with Jerome’s emails to his father.

Smith has been rather severely criticised for her mimicry of other authors, case in point being Harper’s editor Wyatt Mason [I think, harshly] slamming her style as being “the literary equivalent of karaoke”. [I wrote of this in a previous blog].
Sure enough, E.M. Forster’s classic work, Howard’s End does open with an ominously similar line:

One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to his sister.

Thing is, Zadie Smith has made no secret that her latest work is heavily influenced by Forster, and she even calls it an “homage to Howard’s End.”
But I disagree with Mason’s cutting remark.
For one thing, as an accomplished karaoke singer myself, I know that there is a lot more to any song than the opening line. And really, arguing that On Beauty is LIKE Howard’s End is sort of like saying that umm… “Laura Ingalls Wilder writes a lot like…. William Peter Blatty!”
Please!
Some critics need an exorcism or two!

On Beauty is a great novel.
It’s gutsy.
It’s hip.
Real hip.
[Do people still say “hip”? Like… to mean groovy?]

I regret to say that I have been too lazy [there is no other excuse, really] to write appropriate reviews of my most recent reads. Honestly.
Lazier than ten snakes, I am.
So, here is a wickedly brutal synopsis of the last little while…

On Beauty by Zadie Forster → Superb. Funny. Witty. Sharp. Sexy. A must-read.
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell → Good. Not remarkably good, though. Memoirish, stylewise. A bit confusing at times.
Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho → Not all that great, really. I cannot recommend it, and yet be honest with my inner bookpuddle.
Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro → Pretty much goes without saying that I am going to love it and suggest that all living humans read it. Maybe even dead ones!
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl → I preferred his first one, The Dante Club, over this one, but still, a really great read. Well done. For lovers of Edgar, essential.
My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey → Superb, and my favorite of all the books listed here. I literally could not put the thing down.

OK, so now [currently] I am reading what is shaping up to be a great story.
Pearl, by Mary Gordon.
It is real good, real interesting. Powerful strong narration.
And back to my opening topic… check out this opening line, of Pearl:

We may as well begin with the ride home.

I kid you not!
I’ve gotta go now and write an article about how Mary Gordon is… as the French might say it…. “tres Forsterian”!

And, in summary, if you want to go and read a great, worthwhile book, “one may as well begin with On Beauty!”

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