www.richardjespers.com - Blog

A Magical Doorman

9/17/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
Author of Paterson
Born September 17, 1883

W. C. Williams

My Book World

Arenas, Reinaldo. The Doorman. Translated by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Grove, 1991 (1987).

The more I read of Arenas’s work the more I am charmed by a skilled writer’s use of magical realism. In this instance, Juan, a young Cuban immigrant is hired as doorman by a fairly exclusive residential hotel in New York City. He does his very best to learn the names of all the occupants and their quirks and preferences. He fetches and messages for them. He does his best to learn the names of all their pets as well, a veritable Noah’s Ark from the tiniest to the largest. This odd point is where one begins to sense the leap readers are to make, from reality to magic. The animals begin to speak to Juan in “human language,” and at first that seems fine with Juan. But then the situation evolves into something more complicated (no spoilers). Juan is on a spiritual journey to locate a “door” that will lead him and everyone who wants into a better world. Arenas is skilled in dragging along even the most skeptical of us because he has a larger point to make.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Rodrigo García's A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez

A Writer's Wit: David Benedictus

9/16/2021

Public schoolboys are not merely conservatives, they are by nature totalitarian reactionaries.
David Benedictus
Author of You're a Big Boy Now
Born September 16, 1938

D. Benedictus

TOMORROW: My Book World | R. Arenas's The Doorman

A Writer's Wit: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

9/15/2021

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are “unbelievable” are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Author of Americanah
Born September 15, 1977

C. N. Adichie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

A Writer's Wit: David Wojnarowicz

9/14/2021

Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
David Wojnarowicz [voy-nah-ROH-vitch]
Creator of the film, A Fire in My Belly
Born September 14, 1954

D. Wojnarowicz

FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

Rise and Fall of an Institution

9/10/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion . . . . It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
Jared Diamond
Author of Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change
Born September 10, 1937

J. Diamond

My Book World

Leonnig, Carol. Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. New York: Random, 2021.

This book is one of the most fascinating contemporary reads to emerge in a long time. Leonnig, a distinguished Washington Post reporter, delves into the 155-year history of the United States Secret Service—the agency designed primarily to keep the president and family safe. She brings to light its early history: Within a period of thirty-six years, the U.S. experiences three presidential assassinations. Lincoln. Garfield. McKinley. Following Lincoln’s death, the Service is established with minimal or feeble funding. After the third assassination, the congress still refuses to provide additional protection, not wanting the president to be treated like royalty. When Kennedy is assassinated, the congress ultimately realizes it must provide more resources for the Secret Service. And presidents must adjust their thinking. Kennedy may, in part, have contributed to his own death by not adhering to the Service’s request that he not get as close to crowds as he liked. And also by not riding in an open car and by not allowing agents to stand on the rear bumper of his limo.

Leonnig explores subsequent presidencies to inform readers in great detail about each administration since: Ford’s two close calls. Reagan’s near-death attack. How the Service erodes during Bush’s and Clinton’s administrations. How the Service is pushed beyond its capabilities during Obama’s era when threats and attempts on him rise exponentially and when two different “jumpers” leap over the White House fence, one of them actually coming within feet of the Obama family’s living quarters. The author informs us of the unrest within the Service: the frequent change of leadership, the history of good old boy networks that reward relationships instead of meritorious service. She tells of the scandals that rock the service, including details of the one in Cartagena where at least ten agents become extremely drunk and involve themselves with prostitutes. Her conclusion: many problems still exist. The agency needs a complete restructuring, much more funding, and a coordinated effort to heartily renew its mission of always putting the lives of the president and family and other figures ahead of lives of agents sworn to protect them. Until these things occur, the Secret Service will remain stretched beyond its capabilities and perhaps remain a second-rate organization.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

A Writer's Wit: Leon Edel

9/9/2021

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.
Leon Edel
Author of Henry James: A Life
Born September 9, 1907

L. Edel

TOMORROW: My Book World | Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail

A Writer's Wit: Ann Beattie

9/8/2021

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.
Ann Beattie
Author of Chilly Scenes of Winter
Born September 8, 1947

A. Beattie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail

A Writer's Wit: Peggy Noonan

9/7/2021

Part of courage is simple consistency.
Peggy Noonan
Author of The Time of Our Lives
Born September 7, 1950

P. Noonan

FRIDAY: My Book World | Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail

A True Crime Scene Postmortem

9/3/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don't realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.
Sarah Bradford
Author of Diana
Born September 3, 1938

S. Bradford

My Book World

Brottman, Mikita. Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder. New York: Holt, 2021.

This true crime book prides itself in presenting a story that is different from others about murder within a family, and I do believe it is an interesting approach. Brottman offers only a few chapters about the dysfunctional family of a young man who murders his parents and the circumstances that may lead him to do such a thing. The rest of the book concerns itself with the young man’s incarceration in the state of Maryland’s mental health and legal systems. Young Brian Bechtold, once he realizes the severity of what he has done, turns himself in to the police. He expects he will go to prison, because, of course, he has committed murder. Instead, to this day, over fifty years of age, Brian remains a resident of Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. His story is one of abuse by psychiatrists, other patients, and a legal system that does not give healthy support to people with mental problems. If only he were in prison, he would have far more freedom, including the freedom to rehabilitate, serve his time, and get out. But at Perkins he has become a lifer, and oddly, he may be saner than one or two of the professionals who “treat” him. Brottman’s prose is unrelentingly dead, a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of journalism, but perhaps that is what true fans of true crime expect.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

A Writer's Wit: Cleveland Amory

9/2/2021

You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.
Cleveland Amory
Author of The Cat Who Came for Christmas
Born September 2, 1917

C. Amory

TOMORROW: My Book World | M. Brottman's Couple Found Slain

A Writer's Wit: Liz Carpenter

9/1/2021

A major advantage of age is learning to accept people without passing judgment.
Liz Carpenter
Author of Ruffles and Flourishes
Born September 1, 1920

L. Carpenter

FRIDAY: My Book World | Mikita Brottman's Couple Found Slain

A Writer's Wit: Alan Jay Lerner

8/31/2021

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.
Alan Jay Lerner
Author of My Fair Lady
Born August 31, 1918

A. Lerner

FRIDAY: My Book World | Mikita Brottman's Couple Found Slain

Cheever: Master of Suburbia & More

8/27/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.
Nancy Friday
Author of Women on Top
Born August 27, 1933

N. Friday

My Book World

Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978.

After perusing Cheever’s letters, I felt inspired to read his sixty-one collected stories (almost 700 pages)—a compendium I had previously spurned because I had only read his early stories. Mistake. And I withdraw what I said in print in the past about Cheever’s short stories being of less value than his novels. However, I believe his collection does present an interesting profile. His early ones, indeed, are less developed, less interesting, at least, to me. The middle ones and most of the later ones remain his meatiest stories. Cheever almost exclusively writes about life in New York City and its suburbs (Bullet Park, Shady Oaks). Most of his long list of characters are adorned with Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-Saxon sounding) names or made-up names of that ilk for symbolic purposes; if he uses a foreign name, he has something in mind (Boulanger, the French housemaid). Among the A-S names: Pommeroy, Westcott, Hartley, Tennyson, Hollis, ad nauseam—all giving voice to his own cultural dna or the heritage of New England. Some of the suburban stories become a bit pat. Most involve a man and a wife, who, to some degree, love one another, but one or the other is unhappy with this happy marriage—three to five loveable but often invisible children. All involve riding trains to the city, driving station wagons over narrow asphalt roads to summer vacations in Maine or the mountains. People who smoke and drink too much and really don’t care.

But! These must have been the very stories that the New Yorker wished to publish because Cheever certainly gave them what they wanted. For a time Cheever and family live in Rome, Italy, and it is that experience that gives brilliance to some of his most interesting and creative stories. In his letters, Cheever reveals that their family brings back to the U.S. a young Italian woman who works for the Cheevers. In “Clementina,” he brings this relationship to life by way of fiction, and the result is stunning. Cheever’s suburban world is now seen through the eyes of a poor Italian domestic who both loves and detests what she witnesses in suburbia. Cheever really seems to occupy her point of view. Likewise, “Boy in Rome,” is a lovely wandering story with a wonderful poetic refrain about “being loved enough.” Cheever sees Rome with eyes that have become so jaundiced by suburban America that the story is somehow crisper than some of his domestic narratives. He’s forced to observe and judge more keenly because of the environment’s apparent strangeness. A lesson to all writers: get out of your own backyard if you can, and see what happens to your fiction. Anyone writing short stories could benefit from reading these gems, mostly because it may remove you from your current world, and he shows you how to do it: be a keen observer no matter the setting; write what you know; and have fun skewering human nature if you can.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Mikita Brottman's Couple Found Slain

A Writer's Wit: Barbara Ehrenreich

8/26/2021

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation . . . none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Author of Natural Causes
Born August 26, 1941

B. Ehrenreich

TOMORROW: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever

A Writer's Wit: Martin Amis

8/25/2021

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
Martin Amis
Author of Inside Story: A Novel
Born August 24, 1949

M. Amis

FRIDAY: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever

A Writer's Wit: John Green

8/24/2021

When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
John Green
Author of Turtles All the Way Down
Born August 24, 1977

J. Green

FRIDAY: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever

Melville"s Biography

8/21/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How To Write A Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past page three of that book.
James Rollins
Author of Sandstorm
Born August 20, 1961

J. Rollins

Sorry! This post should have come out yesterday, but due to a scheduling error on my part it did not happen!

My Book World

This biography of the author of Moby Dick is all consuming and likable in most respects. Once the reader gets past Melville’s childhood and youth—the fact that his father is poor at handling money and dies in middle age, making it impossible for Herman to earn a formal education—the book becomes more enthralling. Keeping straight the large number of Melville’s siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins becomes tedious. And anyone looking for exacting truth may be disappointed for whenever author Parker can’t nail down the facts concerning Melville’s early life, he uses language such as “may have been” “could have walked,” “is rumored to have,” “may have borrowed,” “may, before this, have demonstrated,” “a reasonable guess is,” “may not have told,” “may have been referring,” or “31 August is safe enough” (450) to make conjecture. Might Parker have chosen to leave that information out if he wasn’t sure?

The chapters and passages concerning the works of Melville—how he researches, how he drafts (his sister is his official copyist), and how he approaches getting published—are entirely engrossing. As a young man of twenty or so, Melville spends more than a year in the South Pacific. From this expedition he mines much material for his first three books: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. One thing that is difficult to believe is that the American press (with highly opinionated and not always qualified critics) question the veracity of his work. Does he really travel to those places, or does he use resource material to “pad” his work? The British press are kinder to him, but it seems that he is always struggling to pacify the whole lot of them. At the same time, he does attract enough positive attention to continue writing. One must realize that Melville, as well as his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, never made much money during their lifetimes. Melville was always begging or borrowing or dealing to keep his family with an income. Would that the poor man had lived to see his place in literary history or to reap the monetary rewards from his brilliant labors!

Though it sold barely 3,000 copies in his lifetime, Moby Dick is the novel for which Melville is most remembered. Here, Parker waxes romantic about his subject (and deservedly so): “The river of Melville’s reading had long flowed into his conscious mind (indeed, it had overflowed there in the more bookish parts of Mardi). Now his profounder reading not only flowed on the surface but was partly diverted into a subterranean river that flowed into the spring of original thought, a spring ready to burst out, under the pressure of the occasion and the time, into Moby-Dick, once the interminable voyage was over” (701).

Parker’s Volume I concludes with an extended scene in which Melville presents a copy of Moby Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne so that the man can see that Melville has dedicated the tome to his dear friend and mentor. “Take it all in all, this was the happiest day of Melville’s life” (883). I plan to read Volume II, but I may give it some time!

A Writer's Wit: Veronica Roth

8/19/2021

If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling—or reading!
Veronica Roth
Author of Divergent
Born August 19, 1988

V. Roth

TOMORROW: My Book World | H. Parker's Herman Melville

A Writer's Wit: Sonia Levitin

8/18/2021

When I was only eleven years old, I decided to become a writer. I told this ambition in a letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder; the die was cast. How could I go back on my word?
Sonia Levitin
Author of Journey to America
Born August 18, 1934

S. Levitin

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hershel Parker's Herman Melville

A Writer's Wit: Julian Fellowes

8/17/2021

Every writer has to make an emotional journey from artist sitting in attic to being part of a business. The writer of a film is like Tinkerbell. You are only there because people believe in you. The moment they don’t, because you’re a pain the arse, you’ve lost.
Julian Fellowes
Author of Belgravia
Born August, 17, 1949

J. Fellowes

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hershel Parker's Herman Melville

Residence on Pablo's Earth

8/13/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
My take is, privacy is precious. I think privacy is the last true luxury. To be able to live your life as you choose without having everyone comment on it or know about.
Valerie Plame
Author of Fair Game
Born August 13, 1963

V. Plame

My Book World

Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth. With an introduction by Jim Harrison. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions, 2004.

The translator for this collection, Donald Walsh, in his Translator’s Note, sites critic Amado Alonso who declares: “‘Instead of the traditional procedure, which describes a reality and suggests its poetic sense between the lines, poets like Neruda describe the poetic sense and nebulously suggest to which reality it refers’” (363). Amen. Instead of moving from the concrete to the abstract or allowing metaphors to emanate from the specific, Neruda seems to dwell, in the bulk of his work, on abstractions or impressionistic articulation of ideas, and one can tend to tune out. However, of course, a number of his poems do catch hold of me for their perceptions of human nature, of the nature of power, particularly political power in mostly Spanish-speaking nations. I particularly admired “Burial in the East,” “Single Gentleman,” and “Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca.” “General Franco in Hell” arrested my attention with its quickly shifting imagery, emphasizing in its closure the utter contempt and hatred for fascist, Franco. All in all, not my cup of spiced tea, but I feel better for having read perhaps Neruda’s most notable collection.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

A Writer's Wit: Sue Monk Kidd

8/12/2021

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.
Sue Monk Kidd
Author of The Book of Longings
Born August 12, 1948

S. M. Kidd

TOMORROW: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

A Writer's Wit: Charles M. Blow

8/11/2021

I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.
Charles M. Blow
Author of The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
Born August 11, 1970

C. M. Blow

FRIDAY: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

A Writer's Wit: Barry Unsworth

8/10/2021

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.
Barry Unsworth
Author of Morality Play
Born August 10, 1930

B. Unsworth

FRIDAY: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

A 'Vixen' and Her Fox

8/6/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
When I was writing The Windup Girl and Ship Breaker, I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Author of The Windup Girl
Born August 6, 1972

P. Bacigalupi

My Book World

Raven, Catherine. Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship. New York: Spiegal and Grau, 2021.

A woman lives in a blue steel-roofed house she builds in an area of western U.S. wilderness that is at least thirty minutes from any burg that might be called civilized. With a PhD in biology, the woman lives in her crude dwelling year round and teaches at nearby schools. And she lives alone. Only she isn’t really. She names two cedar trees on her property Gin and Tonic. She names magpies, one of whom, in a strange scenario, will give up her life on behalf . . . well, that’s a spoiler . . . you will want to discover that tale on your own.

This woman, the author, is befriended by a fox, a red fox, a species whose adult male weighs no more than six pounds, and must survive, as parable and history tell us, by their wits and cunning. She often reads to Fox (no article, a no-name unlike her other friends) on his mostly daily trips to her property about four in the afternoon. First, she reads to him from St. Ex’s (Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s) The Little Prince. And later, Moby Dick. He seems to be lulled or convinced that she is one of him by the way she does not talk down to him or speak baby talk. He even receives his own sections of the book in which author Raven encourages him to give voice to his point of view (he calls her Hurricane Hands for occasionally extravagant nonverbal communication).

Spoiler: Hurricane Hands loses Fox twice, once in the middle of the book when she sees a mangy dead fox, and once at the end (you know it will happen). Here is the magical portrayal of her mistaken conclusion, when, at one twilight, Fox parades his four kits, the ultimate act of trust, in front of the author:

“In the middle of all that confusion of kits, one furry orange animal was dancing on a boulder. I don’t ever need to be happier than I was at that moment when I realized Fox was alive. On the hillside where he was dancing, rivulets rained down from a carnelian cliff and flowed through round-stemmed sedges, not so different from a stretch of the Wonderland Trail that I used to cross on my way to Indian Bar. Those subalpine meadows spread out in my minds’ [mind’s?] eye, and I remembered bending down to pull salamanders out of ice-cold brooks. When it was too dark to see Fox, even through binoculars, I sat back in my chair, and imagined him dancing all the way back to his den. I had just learned for certain that one fox was not the same as the rest” (161)

Near the end of the book, the author, who has thought so highly of Fox, makes an error by planting a little cactus near her front door where Fox usually lies when he visits. The next time he stops by he says, “Quah,” his one-word vocabulary, holds up his paw, then drops it and catches a toenail on the edge of the plant, casting her a look over his back as he retreats. She transplants the cactus again, and Fox thanks her the next day by lying down. Raven tells us that if we wanted to, we could tame or domesticate foxes within four or five generations. But we shouldn’t. Instead, if each of us were to have such an uncommon friendship with just one non-domesticated animal, the world would be transformed to one where loneliness would become obsolete and the natural world would flourish.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD