At the risk of losing the few readers I have that still tune in to Bookpuddle from time to time and wonder….. "Umm, why is this guy pretty much never talking about books anymore"….. umm -- let me now make the situation a few magnitudes worse. Just a few words about… testicles.
Or more specifically, that thing that people say when they are berating someone that is not "manning up" or being "tough enough".
You've maybe used the phrase yourself now and then, or at least are familiar with it -- people that think someone else is being a "wimp" say [and there's no question mark at the end of it, so it isn't even really a proper question], they say --
"Why don't you grow a pair!"
A pair of what? Testicles?
The majority of my Bookpuddle readers are women, but let me assure you, as a man with two perfectly good… [those things] -- I can 100% guarantee you that the last thing I would ask for, to make me TOUGHER, or more invulnerable -- would be like, to acquire somehow… more testicles.
Two are already way too many.
In all seriousness, a five-year old kid could completely debilitize Arnold Schwarzenegger if he or she landed a good kick in the right place. So I am not sure what people mean when they say "grow a pair." They must mean that, in the first place…. you did not have any? That is the only explanation. But even that does not make sense.
Because really, you would be some sort of super-hero if you did not have any at all.
I can understand what it means to grow a "pear"…. but growing a "pair"?
An extra one, like?
It would not help matters. Not at all.
Like having four or six of these things? I would not ever leave the apartment.
I promise -- my next blog-posting will be about books.
Have a great Friday!
*****
The boundary between dream and awake was becoming grotesquely elastic. A psychiatrist once told me that this is indicative of one's ego boundaries breaking down, the next stage into psychosis, where ego and id, dream and reality, form a a tidal wave breaking up all semblance of structure and function of anything in its path. In my father's words in his story, "For Esme", he likens his character's mind to unstable luggage "teetering off the overhead rack" on a train.
-- Margaret Salinger, Dream Catcher --
Have a great Wednesday!
*****
Her eyes were mostly white, of course, with a dark part in the middle, divided by a small ring of blue. It seemed to her that a person should see out of the white part of the eye, not the dark part. But that was not how things were. It was only though the deep hole of darkness that she could perceive herself in the mirror.
-- Dara Horn, The World To Come --
Have a great Tuesday!
*****
The most important thing in life is loving.
And having someone love you, in return.
Until I am shown otherwise, I remain convinced that this is why the word "reciprocation" was invented.
-- Me --
Have a great Monday!
*****
Shortly after his mother died and his first wife left him, Benjamin Ziskind decided that he had been cheated too many times, and that he wouldn't believe anyone anymore. It's true that trust is dangerous. More dangerous than anything else. But eventually someone reminded him that trust is also the only thing that makes life worth living.
--- Dara Horn, The World To Come --
Have a great Friday!
*****
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
-- Isaac Asimov --Have a great Thursday!
*****
This may be the first time I am writing a blog about an author before I have ever read any of their work.
And no! It is NOT only because she is ridiculously gorgeous. There is [believe it or not] another reason.
She is Ontario-born!
Ontario, the Canadian province in which I live, gave birth to this prize-winning author by the name of Eleanor Catton. I have many times ogled her dustjacket image… I mean, her BOOK -- in the store. The Luminaries has the distinction now of being the biggest book [page-wise] to ever win the prestigious Man-Booker Prize. Have any of you hefted this thing in the store yet? It's a beauty.
The story takes place in the 1800's, in New Zealand, where the author now lives. This is all I know about it. Oh yeah, and it weighs about a pound for each of the 50,000 she's now won for writing it.
Click on the book image below to find out more about the author.
Have a great Wednesday!
*****
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
-- Madeleine L'Engle --
Have a great Tuesday!
*****
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein --
Have a great Monday!
*****
I may be mistaken, but I imagine that a major problem with early civilization is that night occurred.
Think about the problem of night-time.
From here on in, I am making stuff up, and have done no research. But think about it -- Darkness is a downer.
At some point in our earthly history, some Leno-jaw-boned guy surely started a fire with sticks and said "Holy shit" before either of those two words had meaning.
Now the problem was how to keep it going while you were not tending it. Hmmm… The idea of perpetual light must have been a…. near-orgasmic problem to be solved. Trust the Chinese….. the race that has had more orgasms than any other type of people! They took whale fat and constructed a device that would give light while you were severely worrying about darkness. One of them inserted a wick at some point. And candles were invented, thanks to this Chinese entrepeneur.
Milllennia later, an American guy [go figure] figured this "candle stuff" was not quite doing all it could do. Thomas Edison devised a light bulb. [Again, I am pretty much guessing here…. who cares what the guy's name was!]
Thing is, nowadays we do not at all worry about darkness. Unless it is voluntary. Or there is an electrical blackout. I can go down to my car right now, in an underground garage, and pretty much have a valid complaint if I cannot find my Mazda in the darkness.
We have come a long way from mistaking a stalactite in a cave for a stalagmite.
What are we even doing in a cave, without a flashlight, in the first place?
This is what I am saying.
*****
I am an extremely boring person to know, unless you want to talk a lot. [Ask anyone I know! They'll tell you!]
What I mean by that is -- umm, I don't DO much.
My favorite pastime is reading, drinking coffee [or beer] and thinking. But also talking with people. I do that a lot.
And I find that I tend to try to steer people toward talking about what I would call… Ultimate Reality.
Ideas about existence itself, Awareness, life after death, religion, God, evolution, etc., -- I love to just try and get a handle on where people are "at" with their own thinking about such topics.
I myself have been all over the map on these issues, throughout my life. And as I rapidly approach a half century of a lot of pensive coffee-drinking [and beer] -- I have sort of settled myself into a number of viewpoints about these issues that seem to satisfy me. But as I discuss them with people I always include the proviso that this is what I "currently" believe -- because it does change. Old ideas get displaced by what I consider better ideas.
[This right now is the place where I will not at all be offended if you click this blog shut, because I am about to yap for quite a while about what I call "anthropocentrism". If you want to keep reading, it will require patience.]
As I have talked with other people, maybe hundreds of people over the years, I've noticed a distinct correlation between ideas of human evolution and ideas of sentient life on other planets.
That is my "premise" statement for what follows.
My observation is that almost invariably, [admittedly, proponents of Intelligent Design throw a few human-made wrenches into it] if a person is OK with the idea of human evolution [a la Darwinism] -- they will almost always also be sympathetic to the idea of the possibility of sentient life on other planets -- I mean, outside of our own solar system.
Many people believe in outright Creationism [a la, The Bible, and other such texts].
Vis a vis there is a God who purposed to create human beings -- and did so. What follows in a discussion with people who feel strongly about this, is that He [God] did not ALSO create other beings somewhere in outer space, on other planets. He only created us. I myself, when a far less critical thinker than I am today, also believed in this idea, and strongly so. [I no longer do].
I find that such a propensity can only lead, whether a person is aware of it leading to this or not, that the reason that everything exists is because of our own existence. I could cite many Bible references that tend to allude to, and in effect, encourage, such an interpretation of human existence.
In light of what we have scientifically discovered about the Universe, however, I have come to see this as a very narrow "anthropocentric" view to adhere to.
Which is to say I can no longer hold to it.
To compare the existence of human life on planet Earth with what we now know about how long [time-wise] existence itself has... existed -- it seems to me an ignorant, possibly arrogant and definitely self-centered way of looking at whatever Ultimate Reality is.
But back to my premise [above] -- I want to try and narrow this current field of discussion to just a few questions that you can maybe ask yourself over a coffee or a beer, to assess what you yourself believe.
Are you a Creationist?
If so -- my premise would statistically predict that you do not believe there is sentient life elsewhere in the Universe. In other words, we, as human beings, apart from God, are the only beings anywhere, aware of our own existence in the Universe.
[Do you see how anthropocentric that sounds?]
Are you an Atheist?
If so -- my premise would statistically predict that you are able to swallow the idea that we are possibly not the only beings anywhere capable of, you know…. creating things like salami, Lamborghinis, and….. Facebook.
Are you an "Intelligent Designer"?
If so -- you may believe that God sort of "used" evolution to do his "creating" of sentient life?
Whichever of these categories you [again] "currently" find yourself falling into -- to my mind, there are only so many options out there, to truly believe in, when you consider the correlation of the ideas of human evolution, and other sentient life somewhere in outer space.
They are these:
1) "God" created sentient beings [us] on planet Earth. And in doing so, "he" did not create any sentient life anywhere else.
2) There is no "God", and sentient life has randomly evolved on Earth, but has not done so anywhere else in the Universe.
3) "God" created sentient beings on planet Earth, and it is possible that "he" has also created sentient life on other planets in outer space. [Which, by the way, sort of turns the Bible into a "Book of Bad Jokes"].
4) There is no "God", and sentient life has randomly evolved on Earth, but it is possible, and even entirely probable, that sentient life has also evolved on other planets in the Universe.
5) There are more than one "God". Ours created us here, and Others, created other sentient beings elsewhere. [This to me is, by far, the nuttiest of all the propositions].
I am being completely sincere when I say that if you can think of yet another [sixth] valid option, other than these five above, I would love to hear of it.
I'm sorry -- but I am very aware that I am a "thinker".
A very boring person, like I said at the start. I think a lot. A real lot.
But I cannot fathom the idea that if every other person on planet Earth died from something right now, and I was the only one left alive... typing away and opening the last of a soon-to-be-extinct luxury of beer [an entire possibility, right? Unlikely as it is?] -- that if that were to take place -- I would be the only sentient being thinking, about something -- in the entire Universe.
To me that is far too anthropocentric of a view to be anywhere near being tenable.
And by the way, if it were to happen, wouldn't I, in that moment, become the Being we have always mistakenly called "God"?
*****
Have a great Friday!
*****
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
-- Mark Twain --Have a great Thursday!
*****
I love living here!
*****
'What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
-- Neil Gaiman, Coraline --
Have a great Tuesday!
*****
Tonight after work I went out onto the balcony with my Harp beer and WOW -- the moon was incredible. The above picture does not at all do justice to how beautiful and serene it was. To the left of it is a very bright planet, and my internet research has narrowed it down to being either Venus or Saturn.
Today was a rude awakening back-to-work day, and this calm sight in the night sky was a peaceful thing to come home to.
Over my two weeks of vacation, amidst the visiting and partying, I managed to read two books, both of them in the genre of memoir.
First, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co., by Jeremy Mercer. It's the story of an Ottawa crime reporter who feels the need to get out of Canada for a while, due to a threat encurrred over a story he wrote for his newspaper. [If you are wondering where Ottawa is, by the way, look again at the above picture. It's that stuff under the moon and mystery planet.]
He finds himself adrift in Paris, lacking in funds and occupation. No job! And he wanders into Shakespeare and Co., which is a famous bookstore [a la Hemingway's A Moveable Feast?] the owner of which, tends to sympathize with the plight of bohemian vagrants. Mercer finds out that he can LIVE at the bookstore if he wants to.
And he does. He ends up becoming a resident there for quite a while. Literally sacking out on various mattresses that are liberally distributed on the many different levels of the bookstore. It is a crazy adventure, well told. I found myself thoroughly immersed in the story and, at times, wishing it was mine.
Makes me want to visit this legendary bookstore one day. I doubt I would ever be able to live there [my real life has too many demands] but I would love to walk around in the afterglow of the many thousands of others that have done that very thing. A really great book.
Then I read Jonathan Franzen's, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.
He is one of my favourite authors, and that really helps -- if you are going to read this book. I mean, it is interesting and everything, but there are those times when you wonder WHY you are reading it. There is nothing incredibly grandiose about his adventures, or even his life -- but since my own life is very similar, I did find it interesting. These six journal-essays are fun, for sure. Insightful. And I think every reader would find parallels in their own life…. especially if you are currently approaching the age of 50 or so [as I am]. All the high-school hijinx -- the angst over nuclear family and personal marital issues -- and then the last chapter, where Franzen talks about the development of his obsessive preoccupation with birdwatching -- it's a lot of fun. I've loved his novels, for sure -- I only wish, in retrospect, that I had read The Discomfort Zone prior to reading them, because I would have appreciated the author's themes [which tend to the side of family, and general relationship dysfunction] a lot clearer. I do recommend it, and reading The Discomfort Zone will reveal the author as a man of great intellect -- in the most modest, self-deprecating, and non self-aggrandizing way imaginable. A man fully aware of his own discomforts, unafraid to share them.
*****
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
-- George Eliot --
Have a great Monday!
*****
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