Splash du Jour: Monday

Have a great Monday!
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Long Overdue

For the next ten days, starting right now…….. starting many hours ago, I have no intention of working. No intention of doing anything I do not want to do. Gonna' chill. Eat a lot of carbs!
Usually when I have a vacation time I get on an airplane and visit someone. Siblings. I am always the guest -- so rarely the host.
I'm the consummate vacation-parasite.
But this shall change in the early a.m., when I pick my brother up from the airport, and commence a time of vacation-hosting.
I'm excited.
My brother is the last of my four siblings to visit me [and Jack] here in our Downtown Penthouse Hotel.
If I am not around much for the next little while, my dearest blogfriends, it's only because my brother is proving to be not only an excellent host [as he has always been, for me] but also, now… a downright wonderful guest!
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Splash du Jour: Friday

Gold and White

Tell me two true things my dear, and we heard a flapping.
Well, the water is gold and those darlings are white.

Au contraire, said I. You speak of celestial reflection.
And no bird was ever all white, it is but their feathers.

This is when you, pulling a clump of sod, fed me it.
And I rolled you off the blanket as those wings beat the air.

c. Ciprianowords, Inc. 2009

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

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 Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

The Vatican is against surrogate mothers.
Good thing they didn't have that rule when Jesus was born.
-- Elayne Boosler --

Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and whom she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read -- no detail was too small or insignificant - so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence.
-- From The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels --
Have a great Monday!
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An Unaccountable Feeling

There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared.
-- From The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels --


I'm finding that this author Anne Michaels does not waste words.
In other words, every part of what she has her characters realize, is important.
As with poetry, here, in her prose, one must often re-read lines.
I brooded over those phrases, "an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence." I thought of Abraham Maslow's phrase, "freshness of appreciation."
Life bursts with things that ought to be appreciated.
Freshly.
The discovery of these things depends upon our willingness to be aware.

I like relaxing.
I like the sound of wind in trees.
The sound of wind in trees, relaxes me.
Hence, whenever I can….. I listen.

In June, I visited my sister and her family in Saskatoon.
The event, the wedding of her daughter, my niece.
One morning I awoke, inexplicably early. Not a creature was stirring…
I went outside, into the same backyard that, the evening before, was the site of a party. In fact, the embers of the fire were still…. embering -- in the firepit yonder. Wisps of smoke. And the trees were chattering.

So I went back into the house, and retrieved my camera. I lay down, flat on my back, and recorded the conversation.
When I finished this breathless minute of footage, I set the camera down in the grass, and my sister asked me if I was a lunatic.
She had come out of the house, and was standing directly behind me the whole time.
I replied in the affirmative.

The very paragraph in The Winter Vault, cited above, goes on to say:
I used to sit with my mother in Grandmother Escher's Cambridgeshire garden and we would feel that strong wind from the Ural Mountains in our faces. The wind is invisible, but the Ural Mountains are not! Yet why should we believe in the Ural Mountains that we can't see when we're sitting in a garden in Cambridgeshire and not believe in other things, an inner knowledge we feel just as keenly? Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought.

Splash du Jour: Friday

It Was The World

Mornings I would wait for them.
I never knew it then, but I did, I waited.
They had a way of arriving. Of staying --
He'd read the paper or a book.
She'd bury herself in a Harpers or New Yorker.
-- of making me feel young.

Feigning a chore I would lean forward
just to hear some of their talk.
Refill his coffee, her tea, slowly, to catch more of it.
Those words between them like dew on grass,
sunlight aslant.

A wayward blueberry on her lip once sat
and she smiled, unbeknownst. No napkin
but his finger, lifted it. Right then it was the world.
When his head bent slightly to the left,
so did mine, and I loved her too.

So, today, when the bell tinkled,
and I turned with two saucers in my hands
toward one man -- nothing more needed to be said.

c. Ciprianowords, Inc. 2010

Have a great Friday!
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Every Lost Country

This is the third Steven Heighton novel I have read.
He does not stumble. Three-hit wonder!
For me as a reader, I need to feel that an author is in control of his story, and this is what I get with a Heighton book.
Often people will ask me what kind of books I like to read, and I used to hesitate, but I've learned that the answer is "Literature". When they ask me what I mean by that, I get positively nebulous. If I could adequately answer the question I would probably be writing literature!
The closest I have come to explaining it to myself is that literature is something that breathes beyond its own pages. When the covers are closed, a dialogue ensues. Especially if you are alone.

I have noted [elsewhere] how Heighton loves to pit his characters against the elements, I won't repeat myself here. They [his characters] battle nature, and in so doing, discover aspects of their own nature that they would have never known, otherwise.
Reviews can often say too much about the plot and I think that should be the dictionary definition of evil. But I think it's OK to say that this book takes place in Tibet/China.
The slash mark in between is so significant. It is a book about borders.
But not just between fractious nations.
In Every Lost Country, Heighton explores the borders between immediate and larger concerns.
Immediate, being those of personal safety and prosperity. And familial concerns.
Larger, being the safety and well-being of others -- those others we could just as easily avoid, or discard with impunity.
For Heighton's protagonist, Dr. Lewis Book, there is almost no such thing as this latter beast. He responds with his entire being to the needs that present themselves. This is exemplified when his ex-wife says over the phone at one point: "I know Lewis, when people are in trouble, there isn't a border."
In this novel, a lot of people are in trouble.
Lewis Book goes to Tibet with his teenage daughter, to be the doctor for tempestuous mountain-climber Wade Lawson, and his team. The expedition is quickly altered by the political [border] problems of the area.
Lewis makes a quick choice that radically alters the lives and deaths of many.
For the love of others -- others are saved, and lost.

I admit, I haven't always been completely sure of what literature is, or has been. But in this case, I'm quite confident that Steven Heighton knew. Knows.
And he gave it to us.
Could've kept it to himself, but he didn't. Ran into the bloodied snow with his supplies. The "Book" getting the better of him….
Get your own --> HERE.
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

[The Sound and the Fury] was the one that I anguished the most over, that I worked at, that even when I knew I couldn't bring it off, I still worked at it. It's like the parents feel toward the unfortunate child, maybe. The others have been easier to write than that, and in ways are better books than that, but I don't have the feeling toward any of them that I do toward that one, because that was the most gallant, the most magnificent failure.
-- William Faulkner, University of Virginia, 1958 --

Have a great Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Hawthorne finished The Scarlet Letter on February 3, 1850. On the evening of that day he read the latter part of the book to his wife who -- as always -- had religiously refrained from any inquiry or intermeddling during the process of composition. "It broke her heart," Hawthorne wrote… "and sent her to bed with a grievous headache, which I look upon as a triumphant success."
-- Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne --
Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery , and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

"Animals don't behave like men," he said. "If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality."
-- Richard Adams, Watership Down --

Have a great Monday!
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Joe Bonamassa

Every so often I have to say something about music, on my blog.
A while ago, my friend Trevor introduced me to Joe Bonamassa, and I feel compelled to spread the net wider.
Joe Bonamassa is awesome.
He received his first guitar from his father at the age of 4, and by age 7 he was playing Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix tunes note for note.
In 2008, one reviewer said of him: “In a thousand years, when archeologists dig out Joe Bonamassa’s guitar from the strata of the earth, it will still be smoking… He holds the guitar like a shotgun but what comes out of it is poetry, color, and a story is told in notes.”
Do you like the blues?
Let me answer that in Holden Caulfield style --> "Who doesn't?"
Do you appreciate gutsy vocals? Terrific guitar work?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Instead of asking a pile of questions that are all answered in "Yes" -- maybe you just need to have a listen to Joe's studio-video of his song "Stop." That ought to convince you that it's high time you started listening to this lad from Utica.

Girls, BEHAVE!

It's so nice to return today to an author that I can trust.
<-- Plus, he's pretty hot. At least I think so!
Not that I'm… nor that it would be wrong if I was….. never mind!
I am in the beginning stages of Canadian author Steven Heighton's latest novel, Every Lost Country.
Having read almost all of his other work, as well as some of his poetry, I can confidently say to you that Steven Heighton is an author you NEED to invite into your parlour. You must let him in.
Heighton likes to explore, in his fiction, the theme of human vs. environment.
Dire predicaments, with emphasis on cold temperatures!
In this latest one, we are in the mountains of Tibet. At least for now.
But he takes us many places -- for all I know, before this novel is done, we could all be falling off of some near-dead donkey in the sweltering heat of Mexico!
Wherever he goes -- he knows where he's going.
Poetry in prose. A depth, where every paragraph counts. No sentence should be excised. Nor another, added.
When you get your hands on him girls, remember to BEHAVE!

Splash du Jour: Friday

This cartoon has a special relevance for me!
Have a great Friday!
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Missing The Mark

It is always difficult to move away from a book that you really enjoyed [ie., The French Lieutenant Guy's Woman by John Fowles] and pick up another directly afterwards.
I mean, the next book has to sort of compete with the chemical rush of the last one, right!
The synapses are all firing on that previous level!
The book I am currently reading [The Purest of Human Pleasures] is good, I don't want to 'diss it, necessarily, but it just ain't as good as the last one!
Have you ever read a book that was supposed to be so good [a real "Award-Winner"] and then the thing really missed the mark with YOU, as a reader? I have. Several times.
But perhaps never moreso than with this one book I am about to mention -- I hope I don't offend any fans of Gunter Grass, but seriously, I thought the book The Tin Drum [a Nobel Prize-Winner?] was not enjoyable at all. Just…. not GOOD.
I couldn't finish it, which is a very rare phenomenon for me.
I once wrote a more detailed diatribe against it --> HERE.
What would be a book, for you, that was "all the rage" and just made you want to "tear the page"?
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.
-- J.D. Salinger's For Esme - With Love and Squalor, 1950 --

Have a great Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Constellation

There were dots on her shoulder, more than this
I cannot say. In that moment I closed my eyes
and leaned into her
constellation.

Any scientist will tell you that no one has ever escaped
such a journey. Gravitational forces are too great
and at that speed you are
light.

In that moment, time itself reconsiders, and yet
cannot do anything about its current direction.
Everything you have ever wanted to do, you are
doing.

c. Ciprianowords, Inc. 2008

Have a great Wednesday!
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