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!

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

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!

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

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!

**********

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...

***********

"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

**********

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!]

*********

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.

***********

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?

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

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….

***********