Splash du Jour: Monday

"Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything."
-- Zadie Smith, her advice for young people --

Have a great Monday!

Splash du Jour: Friday

If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
-- Dorothy Parker --

Have a great Friday!

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Totally chillin'...

Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
[Sound of me not working!]
I am only one day into my vacation time, and believe me, I am loving it. So far the weather is great, here on Vancouver Island.
More specifically, I am in Nanaimo, shown in picture.
So far... hmmm... what have I done? Well, a lot of visiting with my family, some coffee-drinking [Starbucks, of course. Fresh-ground beans. You know, I am still waiting for someone to invent a cologne called "Starbucks-Man"!]
I sat around on the deck this morning, sipping java and reading a great book. Zadie Smith's On Beauty.
Just lounging.
Yesterday though, I actually did do some work. Work that will lead to play!
I helped my brother-in-law install a wakeboard-pulling apparatus to the boat, [not an easy task] so that as early as today or tomorrow we can all commence trying to kill ourselves on wakeboards. For those who may need a visual on this, here are some pics of other people trying to kill themselves wakeboarding.
Just dropping by to tell you all that I am really into this "not working" thing!

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
-- Shakespeare, Hamlet --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Our mania for defining things can be seen most clearly in the fact that the word “dictionary” is in the dictionary!
-- Cipriano –

Wheeee! I’m on holidays now!
Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961) –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

To honor the teacher is a means of honoring the Way. Therefore, the teacher shall posess the justice that reigns between a ruler and his subject and the love that exists between a parent and his child.
-- Ito Jinsai, Japanese philosopher, 1666 –
What I love about the above pedagogical philosophy is how it so quickly moves from → the student’s responsibility toward the teacher to → the teacher’s responsibility toward the student. In fact, it focuses on this latter thing, [as it should.]

Have a great Monday!

The Poe Shadow

“It was a dark and foggy night…..”
No, no, you will not see that kind of cliché sentence anywhere in Matthew Pearl’s latest novel, The Poe Shadow.
But you will follow the protagonist, young attorney Quentin Clark, into many a dark and foggy night!
Man, the trouble this guy gets himself into! And all of it a result of his indefatigable quest to unravel the mysterious unanswered questions surrounding the final week of Edgar Allen Poe’s life.
Clark, a great fan of Poe’s work, had established a correspondence by letter with the writer. One dreary Baltimore day [October 8th, 1849] he happens upon “the saddest funeral ever seen.” [← Cue first installment of rolling fog]. Unbeknownst to our hero, the funeral is Poe’s own.
Clark, suspecting foul-play in the events surrounding Poe’s demise, is soon entangled in a mesh of intrigue that threatens to destroy every aspect of his former existence. He sifts through a churning sea of spurious information, obvious lies and half-truths. 18 months later, his untiring quest to find out what really happened to Poe takes Clark to Paris, where he discovers two men who claim to be the real-life inspiration [or prototype] of Poe’s fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin.
One of these, [the one Clark himself believes to be the real one] returns with him to Baltimore to work on the case. By recreating the events through a collage of newspaper clippings and the use of Poe’s method of “ratiocination”*[see below] they continue to search through all available clues.
All the while, the second man, claiming to be the real C. Auguste Dupin, resurfaces. And his presence injects a ripping good twist of fog-laden doppelgangerism into an already labyrinthian tale!
We want to believe that Clark knows what he is doing, and we want him to succeed in his [oft-bungling] efforts, but we are never really sure of how it will all turn out. We are never quite sure of who is who…. who is helping, or who is hindering Clark in his investigations.

As I began the book, I wondered if I would have to be a Poe expert [which BTW, I am not] to truly enjoy it. I felt the same way when I began reading his debut novel, The Dante Club.
My conclusion is the same on both counts.
No.
Matthew Pearl is far too fine of an author to hinge the accessiblity of his work on the esoteric expertise of his readers.
There would be very few among us who are as well-versed as Pearl is, in either Dante or Poe. And he knows this. His books, couched as they are in actual historicity, are nonetheless so self-contained and self-explanatory that really, all that is left to do is read and enjoy.
Having said all of that, there is no doubt that a true-blue Poe enthusiast would be reading a different book here, than someone with a casual interest in Poe. There is a lot in The Shadow that depends upon a reader's awareness of the Poe tradition. Knowing it definitely helps see what Pearl is attempting to get across.
Allusions abound!
I found myself, several times, cross-referencing Poe poems and stories and re-reading many of these to get a better sense of Pearl’s story. Such activity may not appeal to all readers, but for someone as far gone as myself, any excuse to learn more about great literature is a valid and readily accepted one.

I hate to say the next thing, because it is placing a preferential evaluation upon two experiences of excellence.
Yet, I think that The Dante Club is a better book, overall, than this one.
Having said that, The Poe Shadow is a book that belongs in the hands of every lover of mystery. All lovers of well-written literature. Every person that loves to squint and try to catch some vanishing detail about that presence in the fog, up ahead.
Get your own copy of The Poe Shadow → HERE.

* Ratiocination. NOUN. The act of deliberate, calculated reasoning through the imagination and spirit; the intimate observation and forecasting of the complexities in human activity, especially the frequent simplicity in that activity. Not interchangeable with mere “calculus” or “logic.”
-- From page 111, The Poe Shadow --

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Splash du Jour: Friday

The Trouble With Reading
by William Stafford

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it’s just print – deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.

So some time let’s discover how the ink
feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
page after page. But maybe it is better not
to know; ignorance, that wide country,
rewards you just to accept it. You plunge;
it holds you. And you have become a rich darkness.


Have a great Friday!
P.S.
→ Great article about Stafford.
→ My blog of a great Stafford poem. And another one.

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Something from an ancient mariner....

Everything we look at, even if we can't see it, is a poem.
The seagull in this photo, is a poem.
Everything we feel inside, even if we cannot write about it, is a poem.
Stefanie, proprietress of a superb blogpage called So Many Books, has written a little piece tonight, about the poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop.
For some reason, reading the snippetry of poems that she listed there, got me to thinking of some of the stuff I myself have written.
And so, if you feel so inclined, you can click here and read a short piece I once wrote, and this time around I even tried a silly device known as.... rhyming!
Cheers!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

New York is big but this is Biggar.
-- slogan for the town of Biggar, Saskatchewan, Canada. –

Have a great Thursday!

More Time! More Time, Please!

But no one answers that request.
It is impossible to have "MORE TIME".
No one gets, "more time".... do they?
I want more time. If it is possible to get some, I want some.
Been overworked, and there is no two ways about it.
See, here's the scoop.
The place where I work was.... umm... it caught fire, basically. And the nature of the beast is that, because of all kinds of reasons that I cannot mention here, the employees sort of have to be intrinsically involved in FIXING the ensuing mess. While maintaining the normal work flow of our business.
Unlike, say... a WalMart. Where, if fire breaks out in Men's Wear, those who work in Women's Hosiery are probably not going to be called upon to help wring out men's underwear, soaked by sprinklerheads down yonder!
Right?
But alas.... I do not work at WalMart.

What am I really saying here?
That I've got soaked underwear?
No.
Just that I have not had the time I would like to devote to the discussion of literature.
So please be patient with me. I will be back one day.
Well.... wait a minute.
I go on vacation next week. So..... maybe it will be a while before I get back to normal here.
[Was there ever a "normal'?]
Point taken!

I must say though, I have had occasion to read two great books, as of late. One being Matthew Pearl's [2006] The Poe Shadow, and the other [finished it tonight] Peter Carey's [2003] My Life As A Fake.
Both excellent works.
I will speak of them both, here, soon.
Have faith.

All the best to you.
-- Cip

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equal.
-- Winston Churchill (1874–1965) –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
-- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

And Yet The Books
by Czeslaw Milosz

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, who frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

-- Czeslaw Milosz –

Have a great Monday!

Splash du Jour: Friday

HOLDUP MAN: → “Quit stalling – I said your money or your life.”
JACK BENNY: → “I’m thinking it over.”

Have a great Friday!

Mr. Worn-Out.

Dear Friends:
Just popping in here to say that lately I've been totally worn-out.
This is my excuse for being way less than interesting, as of late.
Actually, I blame my work. Certain events at work have left me feeling that, at the end of the day, I just want to sleep for about 16 years.
I feel like the engineer of the train in the picture probably felt, shortly after parking his locomotive in this fashion!
I feel like a slug.
So all that I can offer tonight is this poem I wrote about 64 years ago.
You can find it here, if you are so inclined.
And speaking of being inclined.... it is off to bed with me.
Good night, and sweet dreams...... zzzzzz! zzzzz!

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind.
-- Cleveland Amory –

Have a great Tuesday!