Splash du Jour: Wednesday

What is Beautiful?

The topic was human relationships. Not sunsets.
Or rabbits. Or cuteness. Or the full moon at night.
One said That surety of each other. Trust. Faith.
The campfire gave a little burst -- as if agreeing.

One looked away. The ability to laugh together.
Far off an owl hooted -- several heads nodding.
Quiet. A ubiquitous goofball mumbled Good sex.
I bent forward to kill flames from a marshmallow.

And I felt it in the exhalation. The perfect answer.
In the distance a clattering train let loose a moan.
Still holding hands when you are old and grey?
Pretty good I must admit. But then I said the word.
Forgiveness.

-- © Ciprianowords, Inc. 2013 --

Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
-- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke --

Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

Have a great Monday!

*****

Splash du Jour: Friday

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
-- George Orwell, Why I Write --

Have a great Friday!
*****

Splasg du Jour: Thursday

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
-- Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners --

Have a great Thursday!
*****

The Satch Comes To Town...

Well, I haven't been around much here lately -- I know. Just thought I'd drop by to talk about my second-favorite thing, besides books.
Music.
I'm real excited because I just got my tickets to an upcoming Joe Satriani concert which will be taking place just blocks away from where I live. Mmmm… I can't wait. It's not until October though, but you can never get tickets too soon, right?
These ones are in the seventh row, middle. I will probably lose my hearing. Oh well!
For those of you unfamiliar with Joe Satriani's stuff -- umm -- how can I describe it?  
You have to love guitar. Because really, that's what it's all about.
And. I. Love. It.
Here's a little taste of The Satch, in action:

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
-- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird --


Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

Have a great Monday!

*****

Jack Maggs

I read a truly great novel, recently.
Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, my fifth of this author's books, and he has rarely disappointed me. I think Oscar and Lucinda was my favourite, and this last one, the second in line. He has won the Booker Prize twice, quite an accomplishment, and you need to read this one. Jack Maggs.
Jack is an ex-con from the brutal penal colonies of Australia, returned to London in 1837 to re-connect with, and explain himself to, his adopted pseudo-son Henry. And in the process he becomes the [honest to God, my cat is sitting on my back as I write this and I am painfully contemplating the necessity of getting him de-clawed]…. he becomes the footman to the neighbour next door to his son's residence. As it says on page 14, "Jack was not a footman." "Not", is an understatement. 
He is to footmen, what kings are to kings, in the movie starring John Goodman, called King Ralph. Basically, he has no clue what he is supposed to do. All his actions are pretence, at best.
His real mission is to re-connect with his son while remaining incognito, and in the process, he is thoroughly psychoanalyzed by a Charles Dickens-like author named Tobias Oates, who performs "magnetism" [hypnotism] on unsuspecting Jack, and finds out all his subconsciously held secrets -- for the sole purpose of writing a novel about the criminal mindset. The maid, Mercy Larkin, informs Jack of what is going on while he is all looped out.  Do they fall in love with each other or anything? Like as if I am going to tell you!
But I will tell you this -- the 91 chapters of this book -- almost deliberately short, will have you flipping the pages to see what happens next.
I loved it, and I highly recommend Jack Maggs to all my own readers. Especially if you like all that foggy old London-stuff [which I do]… people always walking around in a fog, and more things happening than any one person can see at any one time -- unless you have a really good narrator, like Peter Carey, guiding you through the mist.
*****

Splash du Jour: Friday

....life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions -- we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.
-- Amor Towles, Rules of Civility --
Have a great Friday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
-- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose --

Have a great Thursday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar --
Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Spl;ash d Jour: Tuesday

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
-- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose --

Have a great Tuesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
-- Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose --

Have a great Monday!
*****

Shadow Days

Everyone knows I am in love with John Mayer, right? I mean, hell -- I even wrote a poem about him a few weeks ago. I just love his music so much -- somehow he is just always able to speak to my situation, both in his lyrics and his music.
Lately, I've been experiencing recurring bouts of really being down. If I was a person of just a few percentage points less of a strong constitution, I would be in a state of clinical depression, really.
But once again -- just listening to my iTunes on a damp, dreary [lonely] Saturday night, Mayer is yet able to speak to me through a song -- and give me some hope. Make me stay on this side of yonder balcony, if you know what I mean. 
After all, shadows mean there is light somewhere, right? So -- thank you, John Mayer.
The significance of his first line is not lost on me tonight -- 
Did you know that you could be wrong, and swear you're right?

Splash du Jour: Friday

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
-- Roald Dahl, Matilda --

Have a great Friday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Thursday

It is, as you know, very, very rude and usually unnecessary to use profanity, but the Baudelaire orphans were too terrified to point this out to Stephano. Taking one last look at their poor Uncle Monty, the three children followed Stephano to the door of the Reptile Room to get in the damn jeep.
-- Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room --

Have a great Thursday!
*****

Reading: Innate or Acquired?

As far back as I can recall -- far back into my early childhood -- from the moment I began to experience what printed words did to me -- I loved to read. One of my teachers in elementary school [Grade Two] even told my mother, in one of those parent-teacher interviews, that she did not believe I read the amount of books I claimed to read. I was devastated when my mother informed me of this -- because the truth is, I was reading even more than my teacher was aware of. And I still do it today -- approaching my [dare I say it] 50th birthday.
 
But WHY am I this way?
Why are YOU this way?
If you are frequenting this Bookpuddle blog you are probably an insatiable reader, too. 
Why do we do it?
I am thankful that neither of my parents discouraged my early reading habits, but neither can I look to them for inspiration. Neither of them were "readers" per se. Nor were any of my siblings.
I do recall how much I looked forward to my mother faithfully reading Bible stories to me when I was a child, at bedtime -- and if I were to extrapolate upon my thoughts at the time, I think I would have been saying to myself, "Wow! When I am able to do this on my own, I am going to go hog-wild over it!"
Something happens to me when I read, that does not happen when I watch movies.  And I have found that when people get to know me, they too, sometimes acquire a passion for reading that they never previously had. As though it is a bit infectious.
But the reason I myself acquired that same passion, so early on, remains a bit of a mystery to me.
And so tonight I ask the question of you. Was your own passion for reading something that you acquired later on in life? Or are you like me, and can not really recall a time when the picking up of a book never appealed to you?
*****

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
-- Elie Wiesel --

Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Have a great Tuesday!

*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone", he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby --

Have a great Monday!
*****

Siddhartha

A couple of years ago my nephew encouraged me to read Siddhartha. 
I kept putting it off until last week when I finally read the book, given to me as a gift. I now know why it's considered a classic in the genre of books about spiritual discovery.
I expected it to be daunting for some reason -- as though it would be too Buddhisty for me. But it ended up being very accessible, and written in a simple, straightforward way. It's the story of the young Nepalese boy Siddhartha, who decides to leave his family and home to become a "samana" or wandering ascetic. He sets out with his best friend Govinda into this life of renunciation and contemplation, and when they meet the actual Buddha guy, Govinda's zeal is strengthened, while Siddhartha begins to have second thoughts about it all. He questions some of the finer points of the Buddha's teachings -- primarily the seeming contradiction of how the alleged unity of all things is coupled with the need to renounce most of these things in order to reach inner wholeness or "nirvana".
So the boys part ways at this juncture, and Siddhartha sets out on his quest, freestyle. Soon he meets the perfect-10 courtesan Kamala, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Need I say more? This radically adjusts some of his former thoughts about sexual abstinence, among other things. Like wealth. Success. Fine clothes, booze, etc. Mostly to pay for his dealings with Kamala, he acquires wealth, discovering a special avarice for gambling. But again, disillusionment sets in. Satiated with his experience of worldliness, [or "samsara"] he decides to leave once again on a deeper quest, but by now he loves Kamala, and in the final sentence of one chapter the author drops this little nugget of info:
After a time she realized that she was pregnant from her last meeting with Siddhartha.
Oh, oh! He slipped one past the goalie there!
But he's gone now, and unaware of his impending progeny.
These latter portions of the book have Siddhartha meeting the ferryman Vesudeva -- a man who has never set off on any specific personal pilgrimage per se, yet seems much wiser regarding deeply spiritual matters, than Siddhartha is.
Sid learns a lot from Vesudeva. Meanwhile, Kamala has undergone a  transformation of sorts, as well. Together with her son, she sets off to see the Buddha, but on the way, tragedy strikes. A venomous snake bites her just as she is re-united with the father of her child, and Siddhartha takes custody of the near-orphaned boy. What follows is true genius in story-telling, really, because Siddhartha finds that he cannot force the spiritual values he has learned throughout his life, onto this young boy. The very lesson it has taken him a lifetime to learn, namely that wisdom cannot be imparted through teachings of any kind, is worked out in a practical way with his son. The boy himself flees, and Siddhartha is heart-broken.
For me, the message of the book came through loud and clear -- and I would phrase it thus, in the following extremely long sentence:
Whatever depth of spirituality we ever achieve in this life, whatever spiritual connection we ever attain between ourselves and the world we live in, must be arrived at on a profoundly individual and experiential level, and will suffer deficiencies if merely the result of adherence to second-hand teachings or blind devotion to imparted doctrine.
Far be it from me to presume upon the intentions of a great author, but If this is what Hermann Hesse set out to say back in 1922 when he wrote Siddhartha, he succeeded in the case of this reader.
*****