Splash du Jour: Monday

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

Have a great Monday!
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My Saturday Snapshot

I received a terrific book (t.y.L.i.I.) for my birthday in December, and I've finally gotten around to reading it.
How To Live or A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.
That's quite the subtitle, I know.
Montaigne was a French philosopher/essayist of the 16th Century, and this biography by Sarah Bakewell explores his life and ideas. For Montaigne, learning to live "appropriately" (a propos) is the "great and glorious masterpiece" of human life.
I took this photo with my little statue of Rodin's Thinker, looking on -- as this is most exemplary of my own posture and attitude as I turn these pages.

Many thanks to Alyce from At Home With Books for hosting this great meme called The Saturday Snapshot.
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Splash du Jour: Friday

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can... Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.
-- David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars --

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Something tells me this guy is still wishing he had checked the height of his trailer, sooner.



Have a great, accident-free Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
-- Tim O'Brien --


Have a nice Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Sorry the man, to my mind, who does not have in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!
-- Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592) --

Have a great Tuesday!
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Better Than Hamburger

Well, here we are at the beginning of a New Year.
When I was a kid, if someone had talked about life in the year 2012, I would have thought the story should include riding around in spaceships on a daily basis.
But here we are. And we still have cars!
Looking back on 2011, I acknowledge it as a fairly un-prolific year for me, as to both my reading and my blogging about reading.
I blame three things -- Firstly, a bit of emotional turmoil that took my mind away from pages for a while. Secondly, early-onset senility. Thirdly, hamburger.
Too much hamburger in my bloodstream, resulting in abject laziness.
All in all, I read only 39 books in total -- considerably down from my usual 50+.
Even so, there were so many memorable books among those. I'm going to try and choose five here as the ones I would most recommend to my friends.
And once again [I can literally feel hamburger clogging my valves…] I'm going to be customarily lazy and just sort of mention them without going into much of a defence of my reasonings. In other words, no reviews, nary a dust-jacket blurb.
In no particular order, here are the best five novels I read in 2011:

1) The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst.
2) Loving Frank by Nancy Horan.
3) In The Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike.
4) The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
5) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.

As soon as I place those five books there I feel guilty, because…. what about The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor? Or Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brien? Or Rules of Civility by Amor Towles? Or Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler?
Choosing is such a fickle business.
But in all seriousness, let's narrow it down to the one criteria of…. when you set the book down you literally are dying to pick it up again? The book that can make you forget your need for another burger?
For that I must say that The Line of Beauty by Hollinghurst, read back in a prior January, was all of that and more.
Wishing you all a terrific year of reading great books!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror… And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.
-- Virginia Woolf --

Have a great Monday!
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Old Acquaintance

As the New Year of 2012 inexorably approaches I am reminded of something I recently read in a fabulous novel by Amor Towles. In Rules of Civility, there is a passage as follows:
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Sometimes, it sure seems that's what life intends. After all, it's basically a centrifuge that spins every few years casting approximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns. Even if we wanted to retrace our steps and rekindle our old acquaintances, how could we possibly find the time?

My answer to the initial question is quickly answered:
No.
Old acquaintances should not be forgotten.
Just because we have moved on in our life to other things, other people even, doesn't mean we should forget what someone has meant to us -- I think that the New Year is a terrific time to rekindle those memories.
If any of us were to make one resolution, this should be it.
To say hello to someone overdue of our acknowledgment.
I immediately know who I want to say "Hi" to, and I bet you can think of the same in your life.
It's true that time seems to constrain us, at every remove. But I encourage you to make [invent, if you must] the time to say "hello" to someone who has not heard it from you, in a long while.
Wishing you, my Dear Acquaintances, all the best in 2012.
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Splash du Jour: Friday

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.
-- Zadie Smith --

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Have a great Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all of you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall --

Have a great Wednesday!
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Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to one and all!

Dabbling in Juvenalia

Every year around this season [of Christmas], my Reading Partner© and I partake of a children's book. We indulge.
"Children" is the wrong word though.
A younger person's book might be better phraseology. I prefer to think of it as "dabbling in juvenalia".
In 2011 we've chosen Jonathan Auxier's Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes.
Terrific book. I can't wait to get back to it as soon as I write this blog. It would be almost impossible for any book to top Philip Pullman's series His Dark Materials, or Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, but this one is right up there in its own right.
Peter Nimble is this ten year old orphan who had his eyes pecked out by a raven.
He becomes a master at thievery, utilizing the resultant attenuation of all of his other senses.
But, in the process of his… thievery -- he manages to pilfer a box of magical eyes.
Three pairs of 'em.
When he plugs these things into his empty sockets, he is immediately transported into adventures beyond the realm of… well, it is just bizarre. It's worth a look.
One thing I love about Auxier's style is the lack of "dumbing down" -- I mean, the story is even crazier than anything we have read before -- but I just love how Auxier refrains from being child-friendly. There's quite a bit of violence here.
And it's not just the violence I admire, but also the vocabulary.
In one scene an unconscious Peter Nimble is shackled and imprisoned, an empty flour sack tied over his head. He awakes amidst some rather major nasal convulsions, and we read:
With each sternutation came a sharp pain in the back of his head, which was still sore from the ambush outside the Eating Hall. [p.201]
Excuse me?
Sternu…… what?
I had to look this word up. And I am not only 48 years old, but also, pretty much a linguistic genius.
Apparently it means "the act of sneezing."
Ohhhhhh…. right. I get it now.

Wishing you a wonderful Christmas season, free of the flu, or even a cold.
Which is to say... completely sternutationless.
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Splash du Jour: Friday

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No, it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."
-- Martin Amis, The Information --

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Being wise, Professor Cake knew that any relationship not beginning with a punch or two would most assuredly fade over time: it is a well-known fact that brawling begets friendship. Already Peter and Sir Tode were planting seeds of mutual respect that might one day blossom into something far greater -- a friendship to rival the stuff of legends.
-- Jonathan Auxier, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes --

Have a great Thursday!
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Terrarium: A Poem

Relatively speaking, it's been rather a slow year for me and my poetry efforts.
"Efforts" is the wrong word to use though, because poetry should never be a struggle.
2011 was not exactly prolific. I'm OK with that, really.
Poetry, like love, cannot be forced.
I just write when an idea or a vision, or maybe an experience, takes over... and words form.
Usually I am dealing with a ratio of about 80% fiction to 20% reality, in my poetry. Sometimes it's 100% fiction. At other times, I'm at about 90% reality.
You can NEVER be at 100% reality, because as soon as you put something into words it is not what it once was. And that's not to say it is less.... most often it is more.
And you add a few percentage points for someone else reading it.
I think the need for language itself eats up that 10% of reality, no matter how close to "reality" a writer attempts to transmit an idea or a feeling.
A Robert Bateman painting [the epitome of detail, and I have one] will never be as true as a photograph. But neither is it meant to be. Thirdly, nothing beats a real tiger, staring you in the face. But the beauty though, of art, has nothing to do with reality. It's never about what is or was, but it is always about what could never be, until now. The beauty of art lies in its transferability.
I have a cache of almost 400 poems... or what I would call poems. Some people might just call them sentences strung together. If you were to study them in chronological sequence [not all of them appear in blog-format] you would find a movement from structure and rhyme scheme, to arbitrariness, free-verse, and abstraction.
I am thankful for this evolution in my writing, and I attribute my attitude of bravery to my exposure to Billy Collins [a master of the written moment] who taught me, without saying it in so many words, that everything is poetry.
I encourage you to try it.
Write about the difference between how your vaccination scar feels today, compared to the day you received the shot. Write one specific memory of a deceased loved one. Your grandmother's rhubarb pie. Your uncle's barn. The way a candle went out when you opened the window.
But most importantly, write about none of these things I have mentioned. Write about what matters to you.
Just write stuff -- it's fun. It's..... poetic.
One day you and I will not be able to do this, and so we should do it, now.
So many many things that you saw today, or that happened to you, or that you felt, or saw in your mind's eye -- are a poem, longing to get out.

Terrarium

As my father set the thing up I watched,
heart set on a bike, a Mizuno catcher's mitt.
Confusion trebled with the dumping of ants.

This will teach you about industry, production.
And it did, it did that. Day after day, tunneling
against the sides, they carried. Endless lifting.

A frantic community intent on thriving, thrived
under my gaze. But I hated the invisibility of
needless desire. The lack of leisure -- love.

-- © Ciprianowords, Inc. 2011 --

For more of my poems, click --> HERE.
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher.
-- Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom --
Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

There is something wonderful that happens between true friends when they find themselves no longer wasting time with meaningless chatter. Instead, they become content just to share each other's company. It is the opinion of some that this sort of friendship is the only kind worth having. While jokes and anecdotes are nice, they do not compare with the beauty of shared solitude. It was a fact that as the days drew on, Peter and Sir Tode were spending less time talking and more time simply sitting side by side, listening to the sea.
-- Jonathan Auxier, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes --

Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.
-- Martin Amis, Time's Arrow --

Have a great Monday!
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