www.richardjespers.com - Blog

Sedaris: Always a Carnival

9/23/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Propaganda is that branch of lying which often deceives your friends without ever deceiving your enemies.
Walter Lippmann
Author of America Tomorrow: Creating the Great Society
Born September 23, 1889

W. Lippmann

My Book World

Sedaris, David. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020). New York: Little, 2021.

Much like Sedaris’s first journal, this one contains a mixture of “Dear Diary” items along with jokes people tell him, along with long anecdotes about people he knows, along with a certain political polemic (which I love), and more, like overheard conversations in public places. If I were teaching creative writing, I would lift portions of both of Sedaris’s diaries to demonstrate how writers can mine their own diaries for topics or scenarios for other works.

In the early part of his first diary, Sedaris is a poor writer. In this one, he is somewhat more solvent and becoming more so all the time. Now, the man is so busy with readings and lectures, he’s always on a plane, and the airport world alone must offer up some of his richest observations. His dated entries from all around the world show a man who is interested in people, what makes them tick, what makes them say the things they do. Not that he always understands, but he is curious enough to record some of the ridiculous, confounding, or even wise things they say to him. Overheard conversations. How his day has gone, if he’s at home in one of two or three dwellings he owns in England or France. How the day has gone for his husband, Hugh. Jokes. Yes, plenty of jokes people take pride in telling him at one of his readings as he is signing books.

“A guy finds a genie who grants him three wishes, adding that everything the man gets, his wife will get double. ‘Great,’ the guy says, and he wishes for a big house. Then he wishes for a car. Finally, he says, ‘Okay, now I want you to beat me half to death” (211).

“It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. ‘I’m looking for two child molesters,’ he says.
The priests think for a moment. ‘We’ll do it!’ they say” (445).

Sedaris’s title is derived from this tidbit dated March 23, 2013, London: Frank and Scott went to an Indian restaurant the other night and took a picture of the menu, which offered what is called “a carnival of snackery” (289). Indeed, that’s what this book is, and the delightful thing is it doesn’t cost you one calorie to consume!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Myrtle Reed
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elmer Rice
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Gaskell
FRI: My Book World | Jennifer Egan's The Candy House

A Writer's Wit: David Riesman

9/22/2022

The idea that men [sic] are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman
Author of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
Born September 22, 1909

D. Riesman

Coming Next:
TOMORROW: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)
TUES: AWW | Myrtle Reed
WEDS: AWW | Elmer Rice
THURS: AWW |Elizabeth Gaskell

A Writer's Wit: Janet Burroway

9/21/2022

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
Janet Burroway
Author of Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft
Born September 21, 1936

J. Burroway

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | David Riesman
FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

A Writer's Wit: Elise Broach

9/20/2022

Mysteries always have the potential for interesting connections between the elements. I'm also most interested in the relationship between the characters. As in Masterpiece, I'm trying to create characters who not only are solving a mystery but are solving the riddle of their own personal relationships.
Elise Broach
Author of The Miniature World of Marvin and James
Born September 20, 1963

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Janet Burroway
THURS: AWW | David Riesman
FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

E. Broach

Announcing Staycation

9/6/2022

Since the beginning of the Covid Crisis, as I prefer to call it, Ken and I have not traveled much. It's difficult to "vacation" in your usual surroundings because chores still have to be done. So for the next two weeks we will be daytripping to various sites in our own area: Caprock Canyons State Park and Trailway, Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, and assorted other venues such small town museums and rural cemeteries for photography ops. At least these are what we propose to do. At any rate, I will post again beginning Tuesday, September 20. See you then!

'Homesickness' Yields Great Stories

9/2/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A “good” family, it seems, is one that used to be better.
Cleveland Amory
Author of The Best Cat Ever
Born September 2, 1917

C. Amory

My Book World

Barrett, Colin. Homesickness: Stories. New York: Grove, 2022.

This collection contains ten phenomenal stories, mostly set in Ireland. From one about a man who shoots someone in self-defense to a forty-pager about a professional soccer (futbol) player deciding what to do with his life once his career is over, these stories are vibrant with life. What do I mean? They reveal real people in real situations, often ending quietly, with barely a whimper—like most events in our own lives. Yet we recall such situations over and over again with great delight.

Coming Next:
9/20 TUES: AWW | Elise Broach
9/21 WEDS: AWW | Janet Burroway
9/22 THURS: AWW | David Riesman
9/23 FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

A Writer's Wit: Jesse Kellerman

9/1/2022

It's much easier to identify and fix problems in language and timing when you hear the words being read.
Jesse Kellerman
Author of The Golem of Paris
Born September 1, 1978

J. Kellerman

Coming Next:
9/20 TUES: AWW | Elise Broach
9/21 WEDS: AWW | Janet Burroway
9/22 THURS: AWW | David Riesman
9/23 FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

A Writer's Wit: Eldridge Cleaver

8/31/2022

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Eldridge Cleaver
Author of Soul on Ice
Born August 31, 1935

E. Cleaver

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRIDAY: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

A Writer's Wit: Mary Shelley

8/30/2022

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Mary Shelley
Author of The Last Man
Born August 30, 1797

M. Shelley

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

Sylvia Plath's Life: A Red Comet

8/26/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26, 1904

C. Isherwood

My Book World

Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 2020.

This impressive biography of the famed poet may be the most comprehensive literary biography I’ve ever read. Clark, who took more than ten years to write this book, utilizes a broad range of sources, including Sylvia Plath’s diaries, letters (some never before seen), journals, and poems. Clark also includes the story of Plath’s famous poet husband, Ted Hughes. It would be like telling the story of one conjoined twin without including the other; that is how inextricably woven their lives are, right up to Plath’s infamous suicide, in 1963. The acknowledgement page and Clark’s notes section are filled with other sources, she having visited England to conduct research as well as interviews, and having combed U.S. libraries from coast to coast.

The book reads more like a novel, achieving a fiction-like narrative arc. We learn of Plath’s early childhood, the loss of her father, her dominating but generous mother. We learn of Plath’s education, particularly her four years at the prestigious Smith College. We learn of her creepy attempt at suicide, almost succeeding, when her near-dead body is discovered in a crawl space beneath the family home, her electroshock therapy at a draconian institution in Massachusetts. We cross the Atlantic where Plath continues her education at Cambridge University, where she meets her match intellectually as well as future husband, Ted Hughes. This narrative continues to build as we learn of her struggle to cope with a male dominated literary life in London. She is alternately elated and deflated as some of her work is accepted with accolades and “her best work” rejected by the likes of the New Yorker as well as prestigious English journals. It would have been a mistake for her to eschew her British education because the Brits seem, at times, more open to her raw style than the Americans.

We live through the Plath-Hughes tempestuous marriage and become acquainted with their two children. Plath’s death comes with fifty pages to go. It is the climax, all right, but it is not the end of Plath’s story. All throughout the biography Clark intersperses lines from Plath’s and Hughes’s work to demonstrate not only biographical elements but fascinating literary observations, as well. But even Plath’s death is deconstructed in such a way that we may understand it differently from earlier biographies (Anne Stevenson’s “famously negative” one, for example). With twenty-twenty hindsight, we see that Plath’s suicide (as many are) is mere minutes away from being another failed attempt. Plath is always, in the damp English climate and because she runs herself ragged, having bouts of a cold or the flu. As a result she takes a number of OTC medications, as well as a merry-go-round of prescription drugs, including antidepressants, sedatives to sleep, other drugs to wake her up so she can work—all of these interacting horribly as a perfect storm to help end her life (some experts understand that those particular antidepressants may have intensified her depression before finally kicking in).

And it isn’t as if she doesn’t try to live. She consults doctors and psychiatrists galore. She corresponds with an American psychiatrist across the Atlantic. She fights like hell to stay out of British psychiatric wards because she is terrified she will be subject to shock therapy again, which she believes, has altered her brain and her life forever. For fans or nonfans alike this biography is a must-read. It generously takes all we knew about Plath before, all the research that has come earlier, and adds or even convincingly contradicts a great deal of the old. I can’t see any biographer attempting to top it for a long time to come. Indeed, the book may finally put her story to rest alongside her grave atop a lonely spot near where her husband grew up at Heptonstall—a simple granite marker worn down now by nearly sixty years of inclement weather.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

A Writer's Wit: Nadine Stair

8/25/2022

IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER

I’d like to make more mistakes next time.
I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier
than I have been this trip. I would take fewer
things seriously. I would take more chances. I
would climb more mountains and swim more
rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but
I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly
and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh,
I’ve had my moments, and if I had it to do over
again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to
have nothing else. Just moments, one after
another, instead of living so many years ahead
of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who
never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a
hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute.
If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter
than I have.

If I had my life to live over, I would start
barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way
later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I
would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick
more daisies.

Nadine Stair—Lived to be 85

Relax

Coming Next:
TOMORROW: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life & Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman

N. Stair

A Writer's Wit: Howard Zinn

8/24/2022

If those in charge of our society—politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television—can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
Howard Zinn
Author of A People's History of the United States
Born August 24, 1926

H. Zinn

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRIDAY: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

A Writer's Wit: Erin Foster

8/23/2022

I have no college education; I taught myself how to write. If you want it badly enough, you can have it. You can walk into any room and convince the person that you know what you're doing.
Erin Foster
Produced and Starred in Barely Famous TV Series
Born August 23, 1982

E. Foster

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
Born August 19, 1903

J. G. Cozzens

My Book World

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 (1961).

If one has seen only the movie version of this book, a fine work in its own right that premiered in 1969 with the inimitable Maggie Smith starring in the main role, one might be lulled into thinking the book to be quite similar. One would be wrong. This short novel set in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland, impresses me as being an extended prose poem about an intelligent and nonconformist teacher who is yet rather naïve. Brodie eschews the prescribed school curriculum to lecture her female pupils concerning a wide variety of cultural and artistic topics, and yet when she also embraces the likes of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler, she reflects either a certain naivete or an intellectual dullness. The word “prime” or phrases containing that word appears more than thirty times throughout these brief pages; the phrase “crème de la crème” more than five. Both have a rather fatuous ring to them, “prime” referencing Miss Brodie’s heightened sense of her own refinement and knowledge, and “crème de la crème” indicating the girls she has rather commandeered to follow her—not just for the year they are in her class but for their entire lifetimes: they are the “Brodie set.”

Spark’s structure is an omnisciently meandering one in which she may speak of one child in her adult future, one dying prematurely, another becoming a nun. Very lightly Sparks inserts that the year is 1931 or 1937 or that Ms. Brodie is now forty-three. One knows where one is at all times as if the novel were a sort of hologram. Young Sandy is the only pupil who sees through Jean Brodie’s ways, and early on readers learn that she will bring Brodie down. In the last scene of the film, a wounded Brodie who has been released from her teaching position because of Sandy’s actions screams the word “Assassin!” after her beloved Sandy, but the book ends rather quietly when readers visit Sandy upon her adult position in a nunnery. When asked about her childhood influences, she simply says, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137).

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Career of Sylvia Plath

A Writer's Wit: Nicole Krauss

8/18/2022

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.
Nicole Krauss
Author of To Be a Man: Stories
Born August 18, 1974

N. Krauss

TOMORROW: My Book World | Muriel Sparks's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair

A Writer's Wit: Herta Müller

8/17/2022

I have always written only for myself—to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.
Herta Müller
Author of The Hunger Angel
Born August 17, 1953

H. Müller

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRIDAY: My Book World |Muriel Sparks's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

A Writer's Wit: Ted Hughes

8/16/2022

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
Ted Hughes
Author of The Iron Man
Born August 16, 1930

T. Hughes

WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Sparks's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Young Mungo: A Child Is Abused

8/12/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Author of The Circular Staircase
Born August 12, 1876

M. R. Rinehart

My Book World

Stuart, Douglas. Young Mungo: A Novel. New York: Grove, 2022.

Think about the worst things that happen to you before you turn sixteen. None of the disasters most people experience are as bad as what young Mungo faces in his squalid life in Glasgow, Scotland. And as readers, we live it with him, the mother who both loves and neglects Mungo, the bright sister who has a chance to escape the “housing estate” where they all live in a certain squalor, the bully older brother who tries to toughen up Mungo so that he can survive this life without a father. The mother, whose intentions are not entirely clear, because she is often drunk, sends young Mungo on a weekend trip with two known sex offenders, one old and one in his twenties. This is the strand of the story that perhaps grabs our attention most. In alternating chapters, author Stuart seamlessly weaves this story with Mungo’s falling in love with a neighbor boy his age. The scenes in which they engage are some of the most authentic I believe I’ve ever read concerning adolescent love. Mungo is Protestant, and his friend James is Catholic. Their differences threaten to tear them apart at several points. Mungo’s appellation is no accident. He is named after Saint Mungo, and he is often called to the front of a classroom to read aloud about the myths of Saint Mungo. His favorite myth is the one in which Saint Mungo brings a robin back to life. It is this motif that is reflected later on in young Mungo’s own story, but I’ll let readers discover it for themselves as they devour this important novel about who the weak and the strong really are.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Ted Hughes
WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

A Writer's Wit: Alex Haley

8/11/2022

I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
Alex Haley
Author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Born August 11, 1921

A. Haley

Coming Next:
TOMORROW: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo
TUES: AWW | Ted Hughes
WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss

A Writer's Wit: Suzanne Collins

8/10/2022

I think it's very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war, and so they don't because it's easier not to. But then you have young people at eighteen who are enlisting in the army, and they really don't have the slightest idea what they're getting into.
Suzanne Collins
Author of The Hunger Games
Born August 10, 1962

S. Collins

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRIDAY: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

A Writer's Wit: Philip Larkin

8/9/2022

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name.
—from "The Old Fools"
Philip Larkin
Author of A Girl in Winter
Born August 9, 1922

P. Larkin

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World |Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

The Tedium of Suffering

8/5/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Conversation . . . is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all.
Guy de Maupassant
Author of "The Necklace"
Born August 5, 1850

G. de Maupassant

Price, Reynolds. The Promise of Rest. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Price has created what, at times, seems like a tedious novel. And frankly, in one sense it is. The story of a young man suffering a slow death, from AIDS, is both tedious and yet breathlessly fleeting. Millions of lovers (in the parlance of that era) and family members (those who didn’t shrink from caring) in real life have experienced the same tedium that Price re-creates here, and yet once you begin the journey of Wade’s slow demise, you don’t want to leave him behind. Even though this story is over twenty-five years old, it seems transcendent, timeless. Wade’s mother and father who’ve separated. His lover, Wyatt, who kills himself. Wyatt’s sister, Ivory, her quiet yet affirming love for Wade. All of Wade’s aunts and uncles. Secrets! Oh, my, this novel is loaded with them, none of which I shall divulge, but all of them are woven together to create a narrative marking an era that has never really ended—merely shunted aside.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Philip Larkin
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

A Writer's Wit: Helen Thomas

8/4/2022

Everyone with a cell phone thinks they're a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what's far out and what's reality. And they have no dedication to truth.
Helen Thomas
Author of Listen Up, Mr. President
Born August 4, 1920

H. Thomas

Coming Next:
TOMORROW: My Book World | R. Price's The Promise of Rest
TUES: AWW | Philip Larken
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley

A Writer's Wit: Steven Millhauser

8/3/2022

So imagine a fire going—wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green—the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains—and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys—and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.
Steven Millhauser
Author of Voices in the Night: Stories
Born August 3, 1943

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRIDAY: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest

S. Millhauser

A Writer's Wit: Rose Tremain

8/2/2022

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture—which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.
Rose Tremain
Author of Islands of Mercy
Born August 2, 1943

R. Tremain

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Steven Millhauser
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRI: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest