Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

Today I was driving into work by myself and I had one of those thought over-dose moments. I have a friend who actually wakes up in the middle of the night with thought-overdrive. He can't get back to sleep, so he goes to a coffee shop or his office and journals. I like my sleep, so I'm not quite that radical. My speed is when a thought percolates long enough and it starts to take shape, it becomes a blog post. A charmed life. I know it's misquoted; it's from Macbeth of whose main character, Macbeth, it is said -- pejoratively -- that he has a charmed life. Ie. he thinks he's invincible because of certain equivocal prophecies given to him by three nasty witches. That's not the kind of charmed life I'm thinking of. Several times this week -- and on the drive into work -- the thought occurred to me that I'm a very happy (aka blessed) man. My wife and I are now empty nest; the house is quiet and it stays relatively mess-free. Although I miss our ki...

Check out my daughter's songs http://kaylamaiolo.tumblr.com/ Dad is very proud of her!

I was tooling around on the internet the other day and came across this (a warning from a large US fundamentalist Christian organization): "The book's [Harry Potter, The Sorcerer's Stone ] discussion guide ...implies that we can find out truths about bravery, loyalty and the power of love by reading imaginary fiction." Okay, this is so bizarre that I need to clarify that this group is criticizing the discussion guide for implying that readers can learn important ideas from "imaginary" fiction. Let's leave the phrase "Imaginary" fiction aside for a moment and ask really? about the rest of the statement. I can only guess that fiction is meant for what? Just entertainment or escapism? Or is all fiction -- imaginary fiction -- totally evil? It's mind-boggling. So what kind of fiction discussion guides are they okay with? Discussion guides that ask questions like, um, I dunno, "What colour hair does the main character have? And ...

No one is ever prepared to have his first daughter get married. a child and that child’s child unprepared unsolicited undone by water and blood a child and that child’s child taking a first step first bike first backpack boyfriend trip grad another grad unprepared unsolicited undone by time and memory a child and that child’s child giving her my arm giving her away with a smile a kiss and a photo unprepared unsolicited undone by loss and joy

I blogged about Tim Winton's Cloudstreet ; I thought I saved a draft, was going to finish it up, and ZAP: it's not there. So here's the super-short version. Great book. I don't think I've read an Australian novelist. The jacket of the original 1991 edition says that this book "confirms Winton as one of Australia's major writers..." Wow, I guess I should be reading other Australian writers because Winton is great. The book reads like poetry almost as often as it reads as prose. It's both character-driven and has really poignant plot vignettes. If I have any criticism, it's that it reads like short stories and not really like a novel with a central character, turning point, reversal and so on. Or maybe the house on Cloud Street is the main character. Hmm. Winton did say in an interview that for him, central to writing were two things: 1) place -- if the place isn't real, characters can't come alive and 2) childhood. Speaking of w...

If you have an iPad, iPod, Blackberry or any other manner of smart-device, you have to check out the YouVersion app. It has tons of different versions of Bibles in all sorts of different languages -- I'm going to have to listen to the Arabic one sometime! You can download versions for offline reading and you can listen to audio versions. God bless the people at lifechurch.tv -- and/or their patrons -- because the material they're putting on there (free to their users) must be costing a fair bit of money. Cool features on YouVersion is that you can highlight a verse and tweet it or send it to facebook or email it. I just emailed Colossians 4:5-6 to my pastor.

I've just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's Home . If you know nothing about Marilynne Robinson, know that her first book, Housekeeping , considered a modern classic, won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award; her second book, Gilead , won the Pulizer along with a slew of other awards; and then there's Home , winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize. In a book review published in The Independent , Salley Vickers writes, "Home is not a novel in which plot matters. Like Jane Austen, but in a different key, Robinson's intent focus is the super-subtleties of human exchange. The heart of this utterly absorbing, precisely observed, marvellous novel is the fumbling inadequacy of love, its inability to avert our terrible capacity to wound and maim, not even but especially, those nearest and dearest to us." It took me a month and a half to read Home . That's in part due to the fact that our book club did a meet-and-greet in early April,...