Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
-- Mark Twain –

Have a great Tuesday!

The Reserve

Russell Banks never does take the reader quite to the moment of the explosion of the Hindenburg.
But that image - haunting, ominous, and looming – weaves through the pages of The Reserve to suggest what is one of its overarching themes… loss of innocence - as it applies to the novel’s individual characters as well as within the historical context of the story.
In a pre-World War II setting, with America in the grip of the Great Depression, the geographical and historical context of The Reserve adds considerable depth and richness to a book that has many of the hallmark traits of the pot-boiling page-turner. So movie-ready I could smell the popcorn!

Action plays out against the backdrop of pristine upstate New York at a storybook retreat called The Reserve, a secluded, ritzy resort, inhabited by The Beautiful People - people of privilege.
It is as though they are living in suspension, occupying a mist-filled dream life before the nightmare begins. Banks’ lush depiction of a sequestered, complacent lifestyle of entitlement forms a sharp and telling contrast with the understated but inevitable horrors of the war to come.
Stepping from this lovely setting comes the book’s equally lovely heroine, the glamorous, mysterious, and perhaps seriously unstable heiress, Vanessa Cole, who stays at the Reserve with her parents, wreaking havoc on those hapless souls who come under her spell. [I admit, I also found myself wicked in love with her until she turned into a bit of a whackbar!]

Working within classic mystery genre tradition, Banks skillfully manipulates multiple narrative stances, keeping us guessing about the reliability of each of the narrators’ visions, especially that of Vanessa, who vacillates from scheming siren to vulnerable waif with alarming speed.
Ultimately unable to resist her charms – or to discern the degree of validity in the stories she spins - is Jordan Groves, the swashbuckling, notoriously independent artist and pilot that Banks has [my theory] modeled on real life artist Rockwell Kent.

Into this mix, pour a working class character trying to recover from the sudden death of his young wife, a possible case of sexual abuse, an ever intensifying double love affair, and a murder cover-up. Then set them smack down into the romantic twilight haze of America’s upper crust in the mid-thirties. You have the building blocks of a story that feels destined for Hollywood.
[Whether that is a compliment or not will depend on the reader’s perspective.]

All the big themes are here. Fidelity to one’s spouse and country, mental and emotional instability, the effects of social constraints on the individual, and difficulties of self-awareness, the absolute unending beauty of an impartial natural landscape, bearing mute witness to the flaws of humans.

If it all sounds too plot-packed and grandiose for a simple summer read that has a hint of dime store romance hanging about it…well, maybe it is.

But Banks has also laced this barn-burner of a novel with enough artistry to satisfy – or at least to appease – the reader who is looking for more than a conventional escapist plot with slapdash action.
One of the novel’s most interesting artifices is in Bank’s use of inter-chapters, fast-forwards which he alternates with the time-bound linear plot.
The inter-chapters provide tantalizing, if hazy, glimpses into events that will happen after the main timeline of the book has ended.
As The Reserve’s crystal ball, their futuristic setting makes these inter-chapters initially puzzling. For the impatient reader, perhaps even maddeningly so. Readers simply have to trust Banks to eventually bring us into their sharper focus. At first I was confused by them, clueless as to what was happening or even who the characters were. But ultimately, they turned out to be a kind of afterword, resolving many things in the book that would have otherwise been left unanswered.

There is plenty in The Reserve to please all types of readers. Difficult to categorize, it may be read as a love story, murder mystery, historical sketch, or an artfully rendered literary novel.
Maybe all of the above.

I rate The Reserve a solid and splashy 3.5 Puddles© out of a possible 5!
To read an excerpt, click → HERE.
“Reserve” your own copy → HERE.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

Because our worldview so often reinforces our own particular preferences and privileges, when someone tries to change it, by whatever means, we find ourselves locked in what seems to be a life and death struggle. In truth, that is exactly what it is. Because our worldview is plastic, not elastic, it can stretch, but it cannot return to its former shape. So when someone or something has such an effect upon us that it changes our worldview, our consciousness is raised to a level from which it cannot return; as American author Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” We can’t go back. Who we were and how we saw the world dies in the process. We are forced to find a new homeostasis – a new consciousness, a new us.
-- Gretta Vosper, in With or Without God --

Have a great Monday!

Devastation: A Saturday Poem

Devastation

The hardening is deliberate and cruel,
as is all that will come thereafter.
The only consolation being that so many,
so very many others, share the same fate.

The heat, the sweat, the pain.
Left and right, succumbing to the pressure,
those known to you perish.
Blown apart, ripped open, left white
in shock. Naked guts torn inside out.
A mushroom cloud of exposed flesh,
shards of skeleton clinging to the core.

Throw these now (still exhaling steam)
to the gaping maw, to be mashed to pulp
and lowered into hot acid.
Ground in the mingled bile and bones
of comrades, and finally
rammed the length of a cold hard pipe
into a rotting cesspool…

where there is nothing,
nothing more devastated
than popcorn.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!
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What Is Your Religion?

Today I read this following passage, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
It is between Dorothea and Will.
Dorothea is married to this dust-farting old guy that is about as exciting as a bag of dryer-lint.
Will is a swarthy, curly-haired, hot-looking single guy…. artistic-minded.
You do the math!
They are both powerfully attracted to each other, but Will is more aware of it at this point, than is the ever-ethical Dorothea.
They are sitting in the library of the house…

“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean – not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”
“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”
“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea, smiling.

It’s from chapter 39.
I felt that this passage of dialogue was not only wonderfully written, but had some profound insight and depth to it.
Wouldn’t it be great, if rather than wondering what “religion” people adhered to, we could focus our attention [not only outwardly, but inwardly] upon “the belief that helps us most?”

Religion is most often defined as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods. But there are so many variants in such a description of the word, that I really wonder…. is it not almost meaningless, connotation-wise?
Among other things, who is this "super-human" being?
I think that Dorothea is uttering a profound thing here, to Will.

Because really… if there is something, or perhaps an entire system of things, that “helps you” or “moves you” or “motivates you” toward a better understanding of who you yourself know yourself to be… isn’t this thing, whatever it may be, more important when it comes to the distilled version of who you ARE than would be the adherence to a pre-scripted set of religious criteria?

There are only two other sort of options available, aside from saying “Yes” to the above question.

One is to live in a sort of denial of the fundamental reaches of your inner being.
The other is to subject these realms of yourself so dramatically to a concept of what is religiously “correct” [← and how subjective is this option] that you come to identify the “ideal” concept of yourself as being that which is unattainably perfect. [Some might substitute the word “enlightened” for "perfect."]
Regardless…. I would call both options not only futile, but sad.

In other words, I am suggesting that Dorothea asks the best question we can ask.
And Will answers it in the best way possible.

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
-- Ernest Hemingway –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Father, forgive me for what I am about to post....

Have a great Wednesday!
Amen!
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Went to WALL-E

← On the weekend I went to WALL-E.
Here is a robot that needs no introduction.
Probably most of the people reading this have also been to see WALL-E at some point in the past few weeks. It’s still doing quite well in the theaters, especially since, once you try to find a seat for yourself you notice that entire rows are marked off for birthday parties.
Then when the movie starts, you seriously realize... THESE KIDS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BE QUIET.
WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class.
The movie takes place seven centuries after earth has been so devastated by garbage that all life has ceased to exist. WALL-E, [being solar-powered] has sort of continued on, in an auto-pilot mode… daily compacting garbage into little square cubes, and assembling them in what ends up being monolithic skyscrapers of junk.
He also collects certain items that seem of especial interest, and later categorizes them in revolving trays in his own storage container he shares with his friend, an unnamed cockroach.
The huge garbage problem has been caused by a company called Buy N Large, a sort of Wal-Mart gone crazy! Apparently, Buy N Large had the foresight to create a giant spaceship called Axiom, shuttling all of mankind off to outer space until earth becomes habitable again, if ever.
Wall-E one day finds a living plant, and keeps it in an old boot.
Then he falls in love with an egg-shaped space-probe called Eva. She has been sent to earth from the Axiom ship to see if life has re-appeared. When the enamored WALL-E presents her with the boot-plant, she instantly goes into this hibernation mode after sealing the plant inside her chest. Soon the spaceship returns for Eva, and WALL-E stows away on board, to be with her.
The Captain of the Axiom discovers the boot-plant in Eva’s chest cavity and makes the executive decision to return to earth. However, the MACHINERY on board the Axiom is not on the same page, per se, and there is a full-scale mutiny.
Some reviewers are saying that WALL-E is an “instant classic that will stand the test of time and sear itself into the collective memory of a generation” [Katherine Monk, in the Post]. Andrew Stanton of Rolling Stone said, "You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you’ve just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.”
I don’t know.
I think that I simply left the theater feeling that YOUNG KIDS TALK WAY TOO MUCH DURING A MOVIE!
But it was cute. It was good.
And I have said all of the above to really emphasize that WALL-E is about a hundred times better than The Happening!

WALL-E and Eva.
[Note: Eva’s blue eyes are not illuminated because she is in hibernation mode because she has eaten the Boot-Plant.]
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch. Ch.22 –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Have a great Monday!

Balder Every Morning: A Saturday Poem

Balder Every Morning

Like he does not have enough of his own.
He’s covered, from ear to claw with it.
And wants mine.

I cannot tell you how many nights
I’ve awakened to this chewing, gnawing
Saliva-filled, purring feline in nirvana.

My cat is eating my hair.
And it feels good, to me.
I would not tell that to everyone.

It’s all I can do to make him stop.
I say, “Jack! NO!”
But I mean, “Yes!”

And I think he knows it.
Something so therapeutic about it.
He was born at night, but not last night!

I cuddle him close, so our noses touch.
And tell him to behave.
And fall asleep again, hoping he forgets.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

The MIDDLE of MARCH

← Me, reading on the beach, after work.




Ahhhh…. It’s F-F Day!
[That stands for Finally Friday!]
I have not been writing much on Bookpuddle, as of late.
This is because, at the end of each weekday I have been feeling as though I have a briefcase of hammers tied to each ear.
I am getting a bit old for the torturous and inhumane job I do, day after day.
And at my current rate of Advanced Retirement Planning©, I have mathematically ascertained that I will be living on Easy Street as long as I can somehow keep working until I am 136 years old!
Somehow, I have still been finding a few hours each evening to do some light reading.
Middlemarch!

It is an appropriately titled book…. because it is going to take me till the middle of next March to finish the thing.
But it’s a good book. I am enjoying it.
I will stay with it until the final page.
I am currently ankle-deep in the tale. On chapter 22, of a possible 86.
I like Lydgate, but I am worried about him, because I can see that he is going to fall for the shallow Barbie-dollness of Rosamond.
I don’t like Casaubon because he ensnared the vivacious young Dorothea!
And she should have been MINE!
And he is so horridly boring. The poor girl.
I am already thinking she should run off with this Will Coleslaw fellow [Casaubon’s cousin]…. he seems like a real hoot!
George Eliot is a master prose-stylist.
I am ashamed that it has taken me 44 years to finally read him!

I loved this sentence, from tonight’s reading:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

If you have read this wonderful book, drop me a line and tell me what you thought of this legendary Literary Doorstop.
Choose one of the following, for your response!
A) Great book.
B) Bad book.
C) Too many pages.
D) Would have been better if written by a woman.

NOTE: The above photo is not really me.
However, for a real photo of me, taken last weekend → CLICK HERE.

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Splash du Jour: Friday

For their mutual birthdays the pair always contrived some ‘surprise present’ in the shape of a glass receptacle for tooth-powder, or what not; and as they sat together on the sofa he would suddenly, and for some unknown reason, lay aside his pipe, and she her work (if at the moment she happened to be holding it in her hands) and husband and wife would imprint upon one another’s cheeks such a prolonged and languishing kiss that during its continuance you could have smoked a small cigar. In short, they were what is known as ‘a very happy couple.’
-- From Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls –

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move...similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.
-- Honore de Balzac –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.
-- From George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch.6 –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Have a great Tuesday!

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The Underdog Book Club©

The Underdog Book Club©

When it really comes down to it folks, I am not a reader of Best-sellers.
In fact, I tend to gravitate toward lesser-known books… the sleepers.
The ones on the back shelf of some used bookstore.
I like to prowl the remaindered section of the local Mega-Bookstore.
I gravitate toward stuff other people don’t want to read.
Best-seller, Best-SHMELLER….. am I right?

With this in mind, I want to announce something that has been in the works for a while now.
I’m starting a new Reading Group and inviting all and sundry to join me.
If you feel the same as I do, and have the urge to read books that have only barely made it onto the WORST-seller List… then you need to join The Underdog Book Club©.
And here’s the neat thing!
I, Cipriano Bookpuddle, will SEND YOU THE BOOK, FREE OF CHARGE!
Getting your silly paws on such obscure books would not be easy, so I will only select books that I myself inexplicably have a stack of, here at Bookpuddle Headquarters!
I’ll send you one, and we will get rolling!

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the inaugural book!
I’ve got about twenty of them, sitting here!
[This is so exciting!]
OK, it’s from the earlier work of the legendary writer, Fred Haley.
If you want one, just let me know!
You can view the cover of the book → HERE.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different. 

-- John Steinbeck –

Have a great Monday!