Happy Fourth Blogiversary to me!
Wow… four years I have been blogging, as of today.
It seems like yesterday when I posted That First Severely Erudite Blog!
Now, this posting today represents #1,785.
It’s been fun. Part of the joy of blogging is meeting great people, fellow (and sister) bloggers, whether online or in person.
For instance, I am on vacation here in Toronto, and it was so nice to be able to meet up with Patricia and Beth for lunch yesterday!
We had a real wild hoot of a time.
In part of our discussions, we talked about WHY we blog, and I noted that when it comes to the expression of one’s ideas or art, you can’t just walk up to someone in the Mall, tap them on the shoulder and say, “Hey, wanna read this poem I wrote last night?”
BUT [and here is the neat thing] this is basically what we are able to do in the blog-world. Express ourselves in a non-intrusive environment. It’s like a virtual world where you can be assured that fellow human beings are tuning it to you or their own accord.
At their own leisure.
Just like you are doing, right now.
And I know, dear reader…. you are right now wishing me a Happy Fourth!
Am I right?*********
Readability I have been told, is not everything. Neither is breathing, but it does come before whatever comes next.
-- John Ciardi, The Craft of Writing --Have a great Thursday!
God is not body… is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, thought, word, number, order, size… Try to understand, Baudolino: God is a lamp without a flame, a flame without a fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary multiplicity… God in his fullness, is also the place, or non-place, where the opposites are confounded.
-- Umberto Eco, Baudolino --Have a great Wednesday!**********
“I don’t care what anyone says, Toronto has a certain aesthetic beauty to it.” -- Cipriano --
…Especially if viewed from the 32nd floor of the Sheraton Hotel on Queen Street, where I am currently… viewing it! [Photo is from our window].
Wow!
Holidays!
Holidays are why work exists!©
And I’m on one right now – holiday, that is.
So where did I go? No, not Mexico, not Miami.
Toronto.
Well, sure there’s no ocean. You can’t go whale-watching and stuff like that.
Or spelunking. You can’t visit anything of much historic significance, and admittedly, every six feet or so someone reminds you that you have an obligation to relieve yourself of all the change in your pocket [last night I was approached by one down-and-outer that actually produced a VISA machine]… but really, I declare it, Toronto has a certain beauty. This is why I keep coming back to it.
Toronto.
Canada’s New York.
It’s got character.
Toronto.
Hate the hockey team.
Love the city!*********
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
-- Stephen King, On Writing --
Have a great Tuesday!*********
There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.
-- Elie Wiesel --Have a great Monday!
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Two nights ago, right after work, I began the first segment of my holiday time for 2009. Next week I am not working a bit, and so don’t even TRY to get me to do something because I’m telling you right now, the answer is “No.”
I’m on VACATION, and a more deserved one hath never been earned, no, not even by you, dear reader! So I kicked everything off with three hours in my car on my way to a friend’s place. I figured this road-trip would be a great opportunity to listen to one of these audio books, you know, on CD.
And I did.
I listened to Dawn, the 1961 novel by Elie Wiesel.
I also read this thing in normal book format, in August of 1994. [← I keep meticulous reading records]. Back then I had sort of gone on a Wiesel binge, reading about six or seven of his books in a row.
I wanted to hear Dawn!
Usually I do not like the concept of books on CD. But I must say, I very much enjoyed listening to the book in its entirety during those 3 hours on the road.
It is a sobering book. Very much so.
It’s about this 18-year old Holocaust survivor Jewish guy, Elisha, who conscripts into some sort of resistance movement. Basically what happens is he is selected to be the executioner of this one British hostage. And the book describes the inner turmoil, the struggle of this young man as he comes to terms with what must take place at dawn.
He must become a murderer.
And another man must become dead.
There is so much I could say about the nuances of the story. As is everything written by this man, Elie Wiesel, Dawn is filled with pithy philosophically reflective moments.
I had to press the rewind button several times in the 2nd CD when the narrator was saying:
The fear of either the victim or the executioner is unimportant. What matters is the fact that each of them is playing a role which has been imposed upon him. The two roles are the extremities of the estate of man. The tragic thing is the imposition.
To me, those lines sum up the message and the tenor of this book.
Night is the first book in a trilogy -- Night, Dawn, and Day -- reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust. I’ve read them all [mind you, back in 1994 Day was entitled The Accident].
"Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man." --The New York Times Book Review.
*d*a*w*n*
Her Lips She was the first person who loved me that did not bother me. Before ever meeting her lips, my own existed to do just that. To touch hers. Not so much kiss, per se. But to touch. But in touching, a dictionary opened, and an aged Oxonion, smiling, dipped his pen in ink. Smiling, he revised a former statement. It had said, “to touch with the lips as a sign of love.” He stroked this out and looked at a wall. On that wall a scene of an afternoon picnic unfurled. Barley waving, aspens whispering, a robin hopping, and a step from a cliff. On his page, with conviction, he wrote – “undefinable”.© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009
Lately I’ve been thinking of Brian Moore, the Irish-Canadian novelist.
I don’t read enough of him.
Yet I have read so much of him. But not enough.
He is one of my favorite authors.
I’ve posted tons of reviews of his novels, but never this one, until tonight.
The Emperor of Ice Cream. (1978).
No surprise for those familiar with Moore's novels, he comes storming out of the gates with a lighthearted sort of tongue-in-cheek contempt for religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) right on the first page, where young Gavin Burke is having an imaginary dialogue with the icon of the Divine Infant that stands watch over him from its perch on his bedroom dresser.
Gavin no longer believes in God, yet he remains in dread of God's vengeance for the fact of this unbelief. He struggles with what he calls his Black Angel and White Angel which live, one on each shoulder. "The trouble was, the Black Angel seemed more intelligent; more his sort." Comic dialogues with these invisible psychoanalysts abound in the novel.
The scene is Belfast Ireland, early stages of WWII. Seventeen year old Gavin enlists in the war effort to escape the responsibility of continuing his education and getting "a real job."
This is a great spin on one of Moore's oft-recurring themes... a young man struggling to make a go of it, and making wrongheaded decisions as he does so!
Gavin joins the A.R.P. (the First Aid Party, similar to a wartime emergency Red Cross). The boy has a totally negative self-image, and convinces himself that he is just "a second son that will never amount to anything." He'll never be as successful as his older brother Owen, and will never meet his father's expectations of him.
So... he welcomes the War. As did many Ulster adults in that era, who oddly welcomed the advent of Hitler. They revelled in his havoc in Britain, and maintained the belief that the Fuhrer would never strike at their own little backwater towns anyway.
For Gavin, "War was freedom. Freedom from futures" (p.7). If there is a central idea in the book, this is it... it is a key theme in the novel. Believing those six words provided Gavin and many others with an excuse for not facing their personal problems. The ever-present, albeit unlikely, threat of attack provided distraction of all sorts.
The central drama is within Gavin's consciousness and in a bitter conflict between him and his father. Gavin's adolescent fantasies of power and achievement - sometimes sexual, sometimes iconoclastic - always rest on a knife-edge of indecision and powerlessness, of shame and humiliation. But these fantasies, and his father's equally self-serving political/philosophical beliefs are put to the test when the bombs fall.
It seems that Hitler has found Ireland on the map! This changes everything.
Father and son who have been bitter adversaries throughout the novel are reconciled through a shared knowledge of the horror of war. It proves to be more than either of them were ready for, and when they both return to their bombed-out house, they find that the war has changed a lot more than the physical landscape.
Those who know about Moore's own upbringing will see that there is much autobiographical content in this novel.
What a great book.
A word about the title.
It is borrowed from a Wallace Stevens poem. I looked it up in hopes of finding out why Moore chose this phrase as his title. The actual poem is very difficult, and far beyond the scope of this review to even half-examine. But what is certain is that it represents symbolically, the bitter moment of choosing life over death, at a time when life seems particularly lonely, self-serving, lustful, and sordid.
When I first picked up The Emperor of Ice-Cream I seriously thought it would be about a guy that sold ice-cream.
Moore proves once again that he is so much deeper than me.*********
The lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet. And if you say you’re not a poet, then people think you’re putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan. They never read, say, Wallace Stevens. That’s poetry.
-- Paul Simon, in a 1968 interview --Have a great Friday!
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Let our gardening hands be gentle ones. Let us not root up one another’s ideas before they have time to bloom.
-- Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way --Have a great Thursday!
So, today in my reading I learned yet another word. This time I did not wait long but just tried immediately to find out what it meant.
The word is “waratah”.
I had never heard it before, until I read this passage where an elegant award dinner was in full swing, and each table was awash in a “garish display of flowers.”
Then Claire Messud [in her terrific novel, The Emporer’s Children, really, you should read this book] says, “This arrangement – comprised of birds of paradise, waratahs and kangaroo paw (and this, mysteriously, in the brief season of peonies) – was repeated in smaller configurations….”
It was bugging me, so I looked it up online. Obviously it is some sort of flower, but it’s always good to look things up when you have no clue what they really are.
← The waratah ends up being some kind of weird flower from Australia, as shown randomly all over the place here.
There are four kinds of waratah, one of which grows into a tree.
These shrubs and trees have tough, dark green leaves, often toothed edged. The waratah is really hundreds of individual flowers crowded together into a dense head. The bright crimson petals are really modified leaves called bracts. They flower from September to November in rocky and sandy soils from the Blue Mountains of New South Wales to the north in Queensland.
The waratah is the floral emblem of New South Wales.
There you go. Now you know.
As do I.
This word, however, is going to be far more difficult to somehow work into my short story that takes place on the high seas….. unless there is some stowaway lunatic botanist onboard…. yes, yes.
Gotta go. The muse is calling!
*********
Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
-- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1980) --Have a great Wednesday!
Does it ever bother you when you keep seeing a certain word or phrase in your reading material, in novels for instance, and you keep thinking you maybe possibly know what it means but in reality, you don’t really know?
Isn’t it funny how sometimes you immediately look up the word to satisfy your curiosity, but then other times you neglect the research, and the same word crops up again somewhere and you think to yourself, “Wow! I still don’t really know what that means!”
For me, I kept reading the word “avuncular” for about 300 years before I finally said uncle and looked it up, you know?
And most recently? → De rigueur.
I see it everywhere, and I always sort of imagine I know what it means, but really, when it comes down to it, I’m just guessing.
So I finally looked it up!
De rigeur is a French phrase [Duh!] and it basically means, “of rigor” or “of strictness”, as in "necessary according to etiquette, protocol or fashion."
Socially obligatory.
My favorite dictionary, the Merriam-Webster says, “prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom.”
So there you have it.
Now I know.
Perhaps some of my French-speaking readers can shed even more light on this wonderfully ubiquitous phrase.
In the meantime I now feel confident to use it in some of my own writing.
I’m currently at work on a short story that takes place on the high seas, so I’m having Starbuck, one of my characters say:
“Aye aye Cap’n. Jake and I will help get them torn sails patched as soon as we can find de rigueur!”***********
Have a great Tuesday!*******
Question: Did you always want to be a writer?
Answer: No, first I wanted to be a ballerina, but at about eight years old I realized I was going to be too tall, so I settled for literature.
This way I get to eat more cake.
-- Emma Donoghue –Have a great Monday!
Late last night I stopped for gas at a Shell station.
Inside, I handed the guy my credit card, and as he was processing it, I grabbed the little ticket showing the latest Lottery numbers.
Walking back to my car in the light of the blazing overhead flourescence, I compared these numbers against my own ticket I had tucked away in my wallet.
Be damned if not even one number matched the winners, and just as I was saying "_ _ _ _” – “_ _ _ _"- and “dammitall” I noticed that these numbers were for a previous draw, my ticket is for the NEXT drawing..... and I honestly breathed a sigh of relief as I crumpled up the previous winners and tossed them in the garbage bin as I got to my car.
Tucking my own ticket back into my wallet, I revived myself by thinking.... "I've still got a chance!"
My retirement plan is still securely in place!
For other Lottery-related severely delusional blogs I have written, click HERE and HERE.
And for a Nobel-Prize nominated poem of the same genre click → HERE.********
Beginning of the World For months I have been such an animal I wish I would see one. So I could eat it. No understanding of what comes next, the stuff in stores is rotting. Morning is day, and day, night, no one is anywhere, and the most useless thing would be a calendar. I walk. Wondering why I survived, and then sleep, freezing. Keep thinking that someone has to be somewhere. Not a moving bird in days, this is why that flicker of white startled me. Springing to my feet, I crept, crept, half-running – and then full out, as I rounded that caved-in building. Were you an Olympic sprinter when such a thing made sense? All I know is that minutes from now, we are pulling potatoes from this fire. And you stand, beautiful, coming over to my side of the blaze.© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009
I did one of these quick survey things that determine when a person should die.
It asks you a bunch of questions and then estimates your life expectancy.
It’s called Virtual Age or something like this. I’ll provide the link at the end of this blog posting so you can try it for yourself.
When it came to questions about my sleep habits [← as in, how much sleep I get, not…. never mind…] and questions about my diet and alcohol consumption, I noticed I lost some time there… death was encroaching.
The survey calculates as you go, so you can see how each answer affects your basic longevity.
What shocked me though was when, of all the options regarding vocational enjoyment, I had to admit that I “hate my job!”
I INSTANTLY LOST TWO YEARS OF LIFE EXPECTANCY!
What?
Two whole years?
Just because I absolutely detest this God-forsaken 40 hours of every week?
Wow – that’s drastic.
My job is slowly killing me! I mean, I already suspected as much, but to see it so blatantly and scientifically displayed there! It’s unnerving.
OK, so in the end it was really not so bad.
I am currently 45 years of age, and have a “virtual” age of 41.
According to this survey I am scheduled to die when I am 78.6 years old.
Here’s the thing → I am now wondering if the decimal point 6 is referring to six months, or six-tenths of a year! Because see, there’s twelve months in a year, not ten. So, as you can imagine, this concerns me.
I’m wanting the survey to mean six-tenths because this means I’ll have 7.2 months in that final year, rather than just six, before I finally kick off.
In that extra five weeks I can eat at least 30 or 40 more hamburgers!Click → HERE ← to take the survey.*********
There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
-- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) –Have a great Friday!********
Happy Fourth Blogiversary to me!
