Terrific Vacation

Just dropping by to say I am having a fabulous vacation. The wedding was wonderful.
I am thoroughly enjoying the fact that even now, as I type this, I am supposed to be at work.
Bwahahahaha! ← Evil laugh!
And I could not be at a more beautiful place, here on Vancouver Island, in the city of Nanaimo. Hometown of Diana Krall.
We have a house rented for the week, in an area of town known as Departure Bay. [see photo]. It is so peaceful, so serene and beautiful, this place tucked away on a hill of pine trees.
From our deck we can look out upon Departure Bay.
So far, each morning without fail, there have been deer prancing about in the yard. This morning I was out on the deck reading some George Eliot and sipping on a steaming coffee, and as I looked to the right, there below me, munching on the grass, were two young deer.
Needless to say, I am thinking of moving back to Nanaimo.
The other day I was walking through the Mall and passed by one of these donation bins, filled with used books. Not being in any sort of hurry at all, I browsed through the bin thinking, “Hey, I’m as needy as the next guy!”
I found this one book called Awakening The Buddha Within. It’s by some dude named Lama Surya Das.
So I stole the thing.
I mean… I took it. I permanently borrowed it. [What would Buddha do?]
And I have been reading it off and on, here where the deer and the antelope play. I want this holiday to never end.

My Deer
******

Going There, With Me

Hello Friends:
It is very early in the morning… it is still night, actually.
I was “untimely ripp’t” from the cozy bed!
But the time has finally come for me to leave Dodge, for this Infamous Wedding I have been all a-fluster about, for so long now.
Off to Vancouver Island!
I think I may be more nervous and stressed out over it than the bride and/or groom are!
I will be singing a beautiful song called “Go There With You” at the actual ceremony portion. During that song, the bride and groom [since it’s sort of a… near-the-ocean wedding] will be doing something called a “sand-pouring”. Instead of the usual deal with the candles and all. I am also the MC for the reception portion.
At any rate, I am just tuniing in here to my site [as Jack meows in the background, knowing that those blue suitcases mean that Dad is leaving again… don’t worry, Animal Rights Activists… I have a cat-sitter that takes much better care of him when I am away, than I do, when I’m here…] as I was saying, I am just tuning in here as a cab is driving to my place to pick me up, to say that I will not be around much, Bookpuddle-wise, for the next little while.
For those of you who may be interested in knowing about it, the extraction of my bothersome wisdom tooth [two days ago] went extremely well. Excellent excellent dental surgeon.
It was funny, while my mouth was cranked open, Dr. Johnson’s assistant asked me… “So where is it you are going on vacation?”
I stared at her… saucer-eyed!
Is she seriously asking me a question in my current state?
“WHANNKOOOCHEHH” I drooled.

Here below, is the song I will be singing at the wedding.
[NOTE: There is no real visual accompaniment.]
I love this song. It’s by Steven Curtis Chapman.

See you on the flipside!
-- Cipper

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Once we move outside the boundaries of dogmatic Catholicism and Hinduism, both positions can be seen to have deep flaws. Consciousness is universal, and if there is a such a thing as God-consciousness, no one can be excluded from it. By the same token, no one can lay exclusive claim, either. If Jesus rose to the highest level of enlightenment, why should he be unique in this regard? Buddha may be his equal (hundreds of millions of followers believe so), along with Vedic rishis like Vasishtha and Vyassa, who didn’t happen to have religions named after them.
-- Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

I'm not proud of biting the head off a bat. I'm not proud of having attention deficit disorder.
But I'm a real guy...It could be worse. I could be Sting.
-- Ozzy Osbourne –

Have a great Monday!

Jam, and Idleness

The other day I finished reading Middlemarch.
What an amazing book. Truly, I loved it.
Then I was driving home and it started raining.
No…. POURING!
I literally had to drive off of busy Bank Street, onto some side street that was less trafficked, but, to my vehicular-committed horror, I found even this tributary to be already fender-deep in rushing water.
So I pulled into the nearest parking lot.
Hey… it’s a used bookstore.
Seriously. How do you spell serendipity?
So I ran in there, with the rain continuing to pelt the few windows of the place.
An old grey-haired man sat behind the desk. I had the immediate impression that he does not even leave that chair to sleep at night, but simply slumps forward onto the desktop in front of him as night falls. He never even greeted me, as though my arrival in this place [as Noah’s Ark floats by], was entirely expected.
I browsed the shelves.
Hmmm…. TONS of lovely stuff. Like, I mean TONS!

I gravitated towards the literature section…. you probably can envision what I mean? Where a good 80% of the books are Penguin Classics? I love it.
Almost immediately, I reached forward, and retrieved an ancient-looking Mill On The Floss.
Still thoroughly impressed with my experience in Middlemarch, I tucked this paperback under my arm and continued to browse the place.

I have been now reading Floss for a couple of days.
And I really like it.
Thing is… to appreciate these kind of old books, you have to be able to appreciate the masterful elucidation of simple things.
Like… like, for instance… the eating of a jam-puff.

I’m not kidding.
It’s what George Eliot [this guy is incredible] is so good at!

In The Mill On The Floss, we meet, right from the get-go, with Tom and Maggie Tulliver.
They are brother and sister. Maggie is nine, Tom, just a bit older.
Maggie WORSHIPS her brother. She loves him, and he, her.
Maggie is like an Anne Shirley, injected with an extra few CC’s of piss and vinegar! A feisty kid. [Her recent self-inflicted hair-shearing reminded me of the early Jane Eyre.]
The kind of kid you want to just adore, but who would vehemently reject your devotion. A wild-child.

OK, so in this one scene [Chapter 6 of Book One], Maggie and Tom have the opportunity of sharing a jam-filled “puff”. A piece of pastry.
It is the highlight of their day…. they run off with the thing, for a moment of rapturous indulgence.
Nowadays, a kid of the same age would not experience such joy even if you presented them with a new iPhone©, with a year of free use!
So, if this thing about the jam-puff eludes your interest, do not read George Eliot…. as for me, I love this sort of innocence, that [allegedly] once existed on the antediluvian Earth!

Anyhoo…. so, here they are now, with this... this treasure in their possession, and Tom gets his jacknife out, to divvy the jam-puff in two equal portions. But it is so irregularly shaped that he finds the deed impossible. He makes Maggie close her eyes and choose left or right….. she ends up with the larger portion.
Thing is…. each of these kids originally would have deferred the bigger portion to the other…. but… but… BUT…. as Tom watches his beloved sister wolf down her prize….. he… well…. [I’ll let brother George tell it]…

Maggie, thinking it was no use to contend further, began too, and ate up her half puff with considerable relish as well as rapidity. But Tom had finished first and had to look on while Maggie ate her last morsel or two, feeling in himself a capacity for more. Maggie didn’t know Tom was looking at her; she was seesawing on the elder bough, lost to everything but a vague sense of jam and idleness.

Oh, I loved that!
It’s the part where she has no idea Tom is looking over at her…. indignation mounting. He gets royally pissed-off at her! He expected her to give him some of that prize!
But [and this I love] she DIDN’T.
She ate it. UTTERLY UNAWARE OF ANY TRANSGRESSION!

If this kind of literature-genius does not turn you on [no hidden meaning intended]…. stay away from George Eliot.
As for me, I shall read more of him, after this.

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Reindeer: A Saturday Poem

Reindeer

It is appropriate that the name is unchanged
Whether singular or plural.
For tonight I saw one,
Seeming to bow for all things living
Toward the grass.

The Northern Lights and the stars
Were together less majestic than the single breath
Huffed, as the branch beneath my foot
Sent all things living, echoing
Over the ridge.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

Trouble In Tooth 28

Is there ever a “good” time to have problems with one’s wisdom teeth?
The short answer is, “NO!”
But for me, right now… the long answer is, “For the love of God, my holidays start in a few days and they begin with my gig as MC at my niece’s wedding and I don’t want to have a face all puffed out like a raccoon and plus I have to sing and entertain the people and I don’t want to have to worry about sudden eruptions of blood from my mouth and plus I was looking forward to really chowing down on lots of good wedding-food and getting wicked drunk… and… and….”

But, in all seriousness, Murphy’s Law has really gotten me good, with the news from my dentist yesterday afternoon. The current, unbearable pain I am experiencing is due to a cavity in one of my upper wisdom teeth.
Known as Tooth 28, in technical terms!
Lately I have been going crazy with pain…. especially when trying to sleep at night. Amazingly, as soon as I lie down in bed… BOOM!
The pain flares up.
Doctor says this is "a sign of a dying tooth."
I said, "Perhaps! But it is also the cause of a very grumpy Ukrainian!"

So…… the earliest appointment I could make with a dental surgeon is TUESDAY.
And…. my flight leaves painfully early, on Thursday morning!
Needless to say, I am now preoccupied with thoughts of looking like a some kind of bruised and battered chipmunk in front of all of my relatives and friends, when I MC this wedding!
Does anyone have any experience with upper tooth extraction, followed by immediate Master of Ceremonies duties?
Please… only send comments that are ENCOURAGING and UPLIFTING!
I am already depressed enough, thank you!

I have been known to tell a certain riddle, from time to time. It is one of my favorites, and goes like this:
QUESTION: What time is it when a Chinaman needs to see the dentist?
ANSWER: Tooth-Hurty!
Guess what time my appointment is, on Tuesday?
That’s right folks.
2:30

[Quit laughing…]

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!
*******

Splash du Jour: Thursday

A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
-- George Eliot, in Middlemarch, ch.70 --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable for you to be doing something else.
-- George Eliot, in Middlemarch, ch.56 –

As I have heard it said, “Those who love their work, add five days to their week.”
My week has two days.
Saturday and Sunday.
The days I am not working.
If today I won the Big Lottery [which is currently at 43 Million clams and I have two tickets, so I have a damn good chance at the thing…] I would definitely quit my job.
If you, dear reader, would keep working where you currently work, after winning $43,000,000… I envy you. I really do.
Because you are living SEVEN days a week, instead of just the two!
More power to you!

Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

On Sunday, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century, one of my favorite authors, and someone I consider a hero of the human spirit, passed away…

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Dec.11, 1918 – Aug.03, 2008

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn –

Several of my own writings/reviews on Solzhenitsyn:
1, 2, 3.

Wishing you all, a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
-- Ernest Hemingway –

Have a great Monday!

I'll Marry The Sister...

Those of you who have been paying attention in class may recall that soon I will be the MC at the wedding of my niece, Amy.
I am taking the thing sort of seriously. I want to be funny, is what I mean.
I don’t want to just announce stuff.
There’s this one friend of mine [I will not mention names] but his wife Melanie pees her pants when she laughs real hard. They will be there. They will be at the wedding on the 16th of August.
→ Melanie’s…. umm, dress-moisture will be my gauge of success. ←

So tonight I am rooting around on the Internet, mostly on Youtube. Trying to find some funny material to use…. jokes, etc. From former Wedding MC’s that have gone before me. However, my own original stuff is better than anything I am finding here on the Web.
So I am just going to say “Hell with it” and stick with using what has worked in the past. [I have MC’d two weddings before]. I will use my original jokes. Original re-written songs. Drinking beer through a straw rammed up my nose. Stuff like that!
But, in my research I did happen to stumble over a Youtube clip that is simply PRICELESS!
I must share this with you, dear Puddle-reader. I think these two are just DYNAMITE!
This is, far and away, the best first dance of Bride and Groom I have ever seen!
These two are obviously made for each other!
Enjoy!

Mmmm…. I wanna know.
Does she have a sister for me?
**************

Things We Say: A Saturday Poem

Things We Say

No two snowflakes are the same.
But how do we test for this?
Imagine how many there have been.
Has someone caught them all?

Perhaps one, clinging to the window
Melts, just as its soulmate arrives.
Or another, landing on fall’s last leaf
Shivers beside its twin, unseen.

Who knows? Yet we do say it.
No two have ever fallen,
Alike. Unique, we are told.
And so we repeat, and trust.

No two snowflakes are the same.
I am in love with you.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

Mechanical Separation

For the past few days I have been away from my computer.
Regretfully so.
I sincerely apologize to all Splash du Jour addicts out there.
All…. all three of you!
In a very real sense, you could say I have been "Mechanically Separated" from something I love.
Blogging, and blog friends.
Anyhoo… those of you who know me well… (again, all three of you… and you know who you are…) you will know that I love food.
Rather, I love EATING food.
I even like BUYING food.
I love grocery-shopping… and I love reading the ingredient labels on all of the stuff I eat! [Click here for an → EXAMPLE of such a pastime.)
One beneficial side effect of my label-reading (being a Canadian) is that I have learned to speak French!
For those of you who do not know… (all three of you)… in Canada, all of our food has to be labelled in English and French.
My personal feelings (that all labelling should also be in Ukrainian) seem to not matter to any legislators, thus far! But as I was saying…. I learned to speak French by reading labels.
I’m not exactly fluent though! For instance, just the other morning, in the elevator of my apartment building, an attractive woman entered, and said, “Bonjour.”
I turned to her and said, “Vider le chili dans une casserole moyenne.” 

(Umm… → “Empty chili into a medium saucepan.”)
Needless to say, her and I are not going out dancing this evening!

But just today I was sitting there at work at lunchtime, reading the label of my Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup, you know the one? As in, “The Soup That Eats Like A Meal© ”…. or, as we, on this side of the bridge to Quebec like to say, “Une soupe qui se mange comme un repas.”

So…. while this wonderful soup is heating in the microwave, I am reading the label, and I quickly get to the part that says “mechanically separated chicken.”
Seriously, this gave me pause.

I stared at this phrase…. wondering what on earth it was implying…. and WHY it was implying it.
Why even MENTION the “process”…. why make a point of noting that the chicken parts I am about to eat, have been MECHANICALLY separated?
I must admit, prior to reading the thing, I had not even speculated on how the chicken fragments had ended up in this can of soup!
But now I was WORRIED!
Like… I am wondering, is this some sort of disclaimer?
Is it a legal statement?

As in… “Umm, if you find any beaks or toes or paperclips or whatnot in this Soup That Eats Like A Meal© , we are telling you up front that the problem has nothing to do with any sort of human error?”
BEEP…. BEEP….. BEEP….. [the microwave calls me hither….]

See…. as to the other ingredients, I was not all that concerned… for instance, I am under no illusion as to whether or not any carrot fragments were ever in any sort of actual GARDEN per se. Or saw one ray of actual sunshine upon their leafy carrot-tops!
I do not envision Grandma Campbell© toiling in her backyard, pulling each carrot out of the earth and then washing and slicing it, tossing it into a steaming pot, as her calico cat purrs, yonder.
I have never envisioned her actually digging any of the potatoes or anything!
And so now, reading this jargon about this… this Robotically-Severed© “chicken”, I guess I am wondering if the veggies were also grown in some kind of test-tube or whatnot!
Why would a (fairly reputable) food company have to LET YOU KNOW that the chicken that went into their soup was “mechanically separated”?
I am not even sure if I really WANT to know any more information about this!
Because, like…. I want to totally keep EATING this stuff.
Because, let’s face it! It DOES “eat like a meal!© ”

Mechanically separated?
Mechanically separated FROM WHAT?
Do any of us want to know?

***********

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!
********

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.

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

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!
***********

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!

The Garden Of Last Days

Just the other day I finished reading one of the best novels I have read in a long long time.
The Garden of Last Days, by Andre Dubus III. [2008].
It is such a sprawling, yet condensed work.
Even the ISBN people do not know how to categorize it. They list it as combining eight topics: 1) Stripteasers, 2) Mothers and daughters, 3) Older women, 4) Life change events, 5) Sex-oriented businesses, 6) Saudi Arabians – United States, 7) Florida, 8) Psychological fiction.
I am a very slow reader, and so it was noticeable to me how quickly I devoured this fairly lengthy book [535 pages]… noticeable how every time I set it down, I did not want to do so.
The book is sprawling because it analyzes in detail four or five separate, yet simultaneous streams of action. It is condensed because the entire bulk of the story takes place in the six days days leading up to and including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in 2001. Dubus throws together a remarkable, yet highly believable amalgam of characters, in this week of heart-piercing hell.

April Connors, a knockout stripper [her stage-name is Spring] is forced one evening to bring her 3 ½-year old daughter Franny to the Puma Club because Jean, her landlady and ever-present babysitter, has been admitted to the hospital. At the Club, April entrusts her daughter to the care of Tina, who is [to say the least] extremely negligent. Even I could have done a better job of babysitting!
Meanwhile, April is getting [how does one say this]…. umm… more business than usual out on the floor. After one of her normal routines on stage, she is invited to the Champagne Room, and is detained there for a long while, as a foreigner named Bassam continues to hand her a seemingly endless stream of hundred-dollar bills in return for simply talking with him. Or rather, answering his increasingly spooky questions!
Unbeknownst to April, Bassam is enjoying the third last evening of his life, as he is one of the terrorists who will soon carry out the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Dubus based his story on the well-known fact that the Florida-based contingent of 9/11 hijackers spent their last days this side of death indulging in the evil-pleasures of strip-club visitation. For the fictional character of Bassam, the temptation to re-view these Western evils was too great, and he returned to the Puma Club for a private audience with the alluring April.
Simultaneously, one of the club regulars, A.J. Carey, a man on the down-swing of severely bad times [his wife has placed a restraining order on him] gets thrown out of the club by Lonnie the Bouncer for touching one of the dancers, Marianne. A.J. sustains a broken wrist in the process and when he returns later that night, he parks out back and waits for his Marianne to leave so that he can have a word with her, and explain his actions.
What will happen when A.J. sees little Franny crying at the screen door at the back of the club?
To the drunken A.J., she seems to be a helpless, abandoned child, and forgetting about Marianne for the time being, he decides to….. well, really, this is all I will say. You must read the book.

Every time Dubus switched to focus on a different character, I found myself completely engrossed in what was happening with that separate thread. And I marvelled at how all was being tied together… it’s just a terrific read! To use an overused cliché… this thing is a real page-turner.
Full of so many “What If’s”…. as in:
What if Tina was just a little less negligent of Franny?
What if A.J. had not squeezed Marianne’s hand?
What if Bassam did not find the strip-club so alluring? What if he had not taken April into the Champagne Room?
What if Jean could have been at home, as usual, that fateful night?
What if Lonnie the Bouncer had just checked on Franny, as April had asked him to?

Among other things, I found this novel to be a real illuminating look into the absolute insanity of religious extremism. I agree with one reviewer, who said: "Dubus knows that you may not make sense out of the incomprehensible, but you can make art."
This book is definitely a work of art.

Buy it → HERE.
Check out this great INTERVIEW with the author.
Click → HERE for a way better review than mine!

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The Hermit: A Saturday Poem

The Hermit

There was a troglodyte. A hermit.
Deliberately ignorant of all things going
On outside his dripping cave and brown
Beard. Craggy, shaggy, each.

Not knowing Tuesday from Friday
He ventured out to gather seaweed
Or clams. Whatever lay stranded, left
Behind. On the mild, wild beach.

Near a boulder, between driftwood
Ducking and alert, he stooped. Never,
Not ever, squinting, had he ever seen
This before. Dove, love, needing.

It cannot be. Forgotten, every longing
Now awakened, stood to claim him.
In a white dress, the sand held golden
Tresses. Flying, sighing, reading.

She flipped a page. He leaned, as though
Her hand could move his soul. And
Tears like drops of cave-dew sent a ripple
Through his heart. Drop, plop, but...

Turning, the hermit stumbled headlong
Up the crags to what he knew. Two sticks
Will give me heat while I sleep hungry, and
The stone will keep me. Sleep me. Shut.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of marriage, master?
And he answered, saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness.
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
-- From The Prophet / Kahlil Gibran --

Have a great Thursday!

Little Miss Sunshine

Today, throughout my work day…. which even on a really really GOOD day, is about as exciting and intellectually stimulating as watching paint that is already dry, dry… yeah, during this day, which was today, I found myself musing upon what might be the funniest moment for me, in movie-watching history.
I thought and I worked and I thought and I thunk…..
And then it hit me.
It would have to be a certain portion of the movie Little Miss Sunshine.
I will never forget one Christmas when we all rented about sixteen movies and then sat around eating popcorn and drinking eggnog and eating chocolates until we very nearly became a sort of Group Bio-Hazard. There were about 37 of us in the living room of my sister’s place, and we were committed to a marathon movie session.

There was a certain portion…. a certain extended scenario, I guess, in the movie Little Miss Sunshine, where I very nearly lost my life due to laughter. I seriously began to fear for my life, or at least felt that I might end up with brain damage or some sort of internal rupture if I did not stop laughing, and yet I could not stop. [In actual fact, my nephew Ernie in the La-Z-Boy yonder, actually DID kick the bucket around the same time as I was laughing, but a later autopsy revealed that his death was caused by choking on half a box of Turtles©!]

The scene in the movie involves the family in their highly dysfunctional yellow van, ripping down the highway and when Dad [Greg Kinnear] hits the horn, it gets stuck…. and continues to let out these plaintive bleats for a long long while. Soon, a cop pulls them over as Kinnear is driving so erratically…. and meanwhile Grandpa is dead and rolled up in a tarp at the back of the van… and something about the way that horn kept bleating as the cop approached the driver-side door of the van…. well…. it’s just lucky I made it to New Years Day!
I thought I was going to die.
Here is a trailer of the movie. The horn just starts bleating, exactly at 1:16 → 1:27.



This is just such a great movie.
Especially if you have been confined to the same room with 36 other people and are not allowed to leave even to go to the washroom and everyone is high on egg-nog and one guy is dead.
Little Miss Sunshine is right up there with the classics of the genre... like My Cousin Vinny, So I Married An Axe-Murderer, and Liar, Liar.

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Way off to the west in the wire grass were the twinkling lights of a trailer park. Mostly old people. The whole damn state full of them. Like God picked up the country and shook it and all those who weren’t nailed down with jobs and commitments slipped right out of their houses, their card games and visits with grandkids, their nine holes of golf and double dates with other old people who’d lived long enough to make it to dinner one more Saturday night – every year more and more of them just slipped out of their lives and fell to Florida.
--- From The Garden of Last Days, by Andre Dubus III --

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of “choice,” adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in – video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity.
-- George Will –

Have a great Monday!