www.richardjespers.com - Blog

Not a Boring Star

9/18/2020

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
Chris Hedges
Author of America: The Farewell Tour
Born September 18, 1956

C. Hedges

My Book World

Lane, Byron. A Star Is Bored: A Novel. NY: Holt, 2020.

Twenty-eight-year-old Charlie leaves his night job writing news copy for a Los Angeles TV station to become “personal assistant” to actor and movie star, Kathi Kannon. When one learns that author Lane once served as Carrie Fisher’s PA, one wants to turn Kathi’s voice into Carrie’s, Gracie Gold’s (Kathy’s mother) into Debbie Reynolds. As with any competent fiction, however, Lane creates two great characters that only reflect that he once knew them both, not that he’s out to recreate them.

And this book is full of so many unforgettable voices. Begin with Kathi’s: off the bat she renames Charlie “Cockring.” From there, it’s only a short step to all the other outrageous things she says while he shops with her, travels with her, sees her in and out of hospitals for . . . well, read for yourself to find out what. Cockring’s head is full of voices: his father bellowing at him through the years by way of sentences in all caps: “WE ALL HAVE TO DO THINGS IN LIFE WE DON’T WANT TO DO!” (66); his own fears as he speaks to his inner Siri: “Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade” (77); the voice of Cockring’s Therapista; the voices of all the other PAs to Hollywood stars, all with their own nicknames, who collectively write what is known as The Assistant’s Bible, chock full of information every great PA should memorize.

Cockring realizes early: “I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that ‘good things’ include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers” (91).

At a certain point, however, Cockring will learn this lesson a bit too well, and, like all good young protagonists, will have a crisis of identity. How that turns out will have to be the reader’s adventure. I’m not spoiling it for anybody. For laughs and tears, for good feelings and bad, you must read this book.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Life to Come

A Writer's Wit: Sean Covey

9/17/2020

Although I’m a retired teenager, I remember what it was like to be one. I could have sworn I was riding an emotional roller coaster most of the time. Looking back, I’m actually amazed that I survived.
Sean Covey
Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens
Born September 17, 1964

S. Covey

TOMORROW: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored

A Writer's Wit: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

9/16/2020

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward—well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Author of Finding Your Roots
Born September 16, 1950

H. Gates

FRIDAY: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored

A Writer's Wit: Agatha Christie

9/15/2020

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.
Agatha Christie
Author of Murder on the Orient Express
Born September 15, 1890

A. Christie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored

Monette: Still the Last Watch

9/11/2020

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's [sic] starving!
O. Henry
Author of Gift of the Magi
Born September 11, 1862

O. Henry

My Book World

Monette, Paul. Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise. New York: Harcourt, 1994.

Dear Paul,
I’m pretending that you gaze over my shoulder and peruse this piece about you and Last Watch of the Night. On pages 267-8, you discuss your hoarding of books, and I’m so glad to learn that I’m not the only one who does this. In recataloging my library of 1,300 books, a year ago, I realize that 300 of them remain unread, and, until now [during COVID, I am endeavoring to catch up, now having read fifty-six], yours has been one of them. I feel disgusted that I didn’t read it when it came out, but that was the first year of teaching AP English in high school, and my reading tasks were to stay at least one chapter ahead of my five classes of bright bulbs. So now to why I love this book and why it will never be dated.

Your essays, at times, seem long and meandering, but readers, make no mistake, they are ordered; they have organization. I believe it is a nonlinear order in which, for example, in an essay about travel, you mention sojourning with all three of your long-term relationships: Roger, Stevie, and Winston. What I like about this sort of organization is it allows the essayist to discuss bigger pictures, larger topics. In the first essay entitled, “Puck,” ostensibly about yours and Roger’s Rhodesian ridgeback-Lab mix, the piece spans out, in which this “noble beast” (28) is the glue holding you two lovers together until Roger succumbs to AIDS.

In another essay, “Gert,” you bring to light your first relationship with a lesbian, in this case, Gertrude Macy, a “maiden great-aunt” of one of your pupils. After she reads your novel manuscript, Gert asks, “Does it have to be so gay?” You answer:

“Oh, indeed it did. The gayer the better. I launched into my half-baked credo, invoking the name of [E. M.] Forster, the writer to whom I was most in thrall, and the one who had failed me the most as well. When Forster decided he dare not publish Maurice, for fear of the scandal and what his mother would think; when he locked that manuscript in a drawer for fifty years until he died, he silenced much more than himself. He put up a wall that prevented us, his gay and lesbian heirs, from having a place to begin” (43). I tend to agree, but one must think about the consequences for Forster if he had released Maurice. Lost revenue? Loss of a career? His life? Prison time?

A fallen Catholic yourself, in fact a defiant ex-Catholic, you discuss your relationship with several different “priests.” You cover gravesites and “The Politics of Silence.” “A One-Way Fare,” your paean to travel, becomes a metaphor for the one-way trip we all make through life. I love how you move from Mont-Saint-Michel to Noel Coward’s Private Lives, to a ten-line excerpt from that play, and on to Greece, all within a page—yet all connected.

Young gays need to read you, just as we read Forster and Isherwood, our forebears, so that they may know from whence they come. They must realize that the fight for freedom and equality is never over. It just shifts from one opponent to another. You fought to bring AIDS into a national focus, and perhaps the young will see that the COVID-19 battle is much the same: unless we change our national leadership COVID will be with us forever, just like AIDS is still with us. One must thank you for your fight, which ended all too soon. You would just now be enjoying a long-deserved homage at the ripe age of seventy-five.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored

A Writer's Wit: Pat Cadigan

9/10/2020

I took this “how to build computers” course basically because I'm sick and tired of getting ripped off by cheesy computer companies. Software baffles me. I like hardware. I used to change my own oil, and now I want to build my own computer so I can have what I want.
Pat Cadigan
Author of Tea from an Empty Cup
Born September 10, 1953

P. Cadigan

TOMORROW: My Book World | Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night

A Writer's Wit: Mary Hunter Austin

9/9/2020

Death by starvation is slow.
Mary Hunter Austin
Author of The Land of Journeys' Ending
Born September 9, 1868

M. H. Austin

FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Memoir Last Watch of the Night

A Writer's Wit: Ann Beattie

9/8/2020

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.
Ann Beattie
Author of Mrs. Nixon
Born September 8, 1947

A. Beattie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Memoir Last Watch of the Night

She Explains Too Little

9/4/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
Author of The Theatre and Its Double
Born September 4, 1896

A. Artaud

My Book World

Lardner, Kate. Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid. New York: Ballantine, 2004.

About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: Poor writing and poor editing. What could have been enlightening and touching was scattered and uninteresting. Lardner keeps an emotional distance throughout that is not very pleasant.

In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just lacks a certain depth. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who ceases to be offered film roles because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career.

What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family. Perhaps it’s her way of dealing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise.

A WRITER'S WIT: RACHEL JOHNSON

9/3/2020

Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives. Which makes me realise that my parents were brilliant, not for what they did, but more for what they didn't do.
Rachel Johnson
Author of Rake's Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis
Born September 3, 1965

R. Johnson

TOMORROW: Kate Lardner's Shut Up He Explained

A Writer's Wit: David Daiches

9/2/2020

The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man's determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.
David Daiches
Author of Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present
Born September 2, 1912

D. Daiches

FRIDAY: My Book World | Kate Lardner's Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

A Writer's Wit: Liz Carpenter

9/1/2020

Anybody against women, against the ERA, should never be voted into office again.
Liz Carpenter
Author of Unplanned Parenthood
Born September 1, 1920

L. Carpenter

FRIDAY: My Book World | Kate Lardner's Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

Two-Week Staycation or Holistay?

8/18/2020

I WILL NOT POST AGAIN UNTIL SEPTEMBER 1, 2020. I INTEND TO WASH WINDOWS, CLEAN OUT CLOSETS, AND COOK EXOTIC DISHES . . . BUT I'LL PROBABLY JUST READ EVEN MORE BOOKS.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO BROWSE AMONG PAST POSTS LISTED TO THE RIGHT BY MONTH AND YEAR.

MY BEST!
RJ

photos from favorite Vacations

Kon-Tiki: A Wondrous Naiveté

8/14/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.
Mary E. Pearson
Author of Dance of Thieves
Born August 14, 1955

M. E. Pearson

My Book World

Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand, 1950.

This book may have been written for adults, but I have to believe its adventurous tale appeals to the child inside each one of us. A Norwegian scholar develops a theory that at one time people of Peru crossed the South Pacific; Heyerdahl acquires this idea because huge statues on Easter Island so closely resemble ones found in Peru. Very quickly it seems he scrabbles together a crew of five other men and from drawings of a raft that would have been used in earlier times, the men build the Kon-Tiki essentially from nine huge balsa logs. That feat itself is a large undertaking as the men somehow receive permission from Peruvian officials to go into the forest and harvest such logs from balsa trees—even though commercial logging of balsa has been disallowed for some time.

Then there is the 4,000 mile adventure in which, at first, the raft with a sail is seized by the Humboldt Current. However, as they escape its grasp, the six men embark on a most idyllic, though challenging, cruise across the South Pacific. They worry little about food (though they’ve brought certain stores with them) as they are besieged in the morning with flying fish that they either cook for breakfast or use as bait to catch bigger fish. Creatures large and small are curiously drawn to their vessel, and, though the men are wary at first, they become friends with the aquatic beasts. The primitive raft has its shortcomings so when they finally come upon an island, because of the raft’s steering limitations, they must pass it by. Sometime later, however, they spot another island group, and this time their voyage comes to an abrupt end as the raft breaks up on a reef.

What follows may be the most delightful part of Heyerdahl’s perfectly arced narrative. Curious natives from a nearby island of 127 inhabitants see smoke from the men’s cooking fire and carefully approach them. The six men become heroes to the village and are treated royally for weeks on end before they are able to use their ham (amateur) radio and contact Tahiti and then Norwegian officials. A 4,000 ton ship is dispatched to pick them up, and then the six men and all villagers part with tears in their eyes. The book may be tinged with a childlike naiveté, but it is also filled with a certain curiosity and courage, qualities that are necessary for cultures to cross boundaries and for its inhabitants to realize they have more in common than they don’t.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 4: My Book World | Kate Lardner's Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

A Writer's Wit: George Packer

8/13/2020

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
George Packer
Author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
Born August 13, 1960

G. Packer

TOMORROW: My Book World: Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

A Writer's Wit: Chris Bohjalian

8/12/2020

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Chris Bohjalian
Author of The Flight Attendant
Born August 12,1962

C. Bohjalian

FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

A Writer's Wit: Charles M. Blow

8/11/2020

One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.
Charles M. Blow
Author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Born August 11,1970

C. B. Blow

FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.
Brit Marling
Co-Writer for film Sound of My Voice
Born August 7, 1983

B. Marling

Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2020 (1990).

It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew.

Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast. On the other hand, after thirty years, most of the scientific information Guibert possesses is redundant or has been proven wrong. It’s painful to read about either party.

Even if this work functions as a sort of roman à clef by not naming names, it certainly portrays the dastardly acts of treacherous friends. A character named Muzil is supposedly the noted philosopher Michel Foucault; Marine is based on the life of actor, Isabelle Adjani; and yet “Bill,” Guibert’s friend of the title remains a mystery, a traitor who brags about, as a Miami pharmaceutical executive, getting Guibert in on the ground floor of a vaccine, but cruelly fails to do so. This book, a combination of linear and nonlinear elements, takes us back to the past, but it strangely plops us into the present of yet another untamable virus and directs us toward a future of even more death and destruction. Not a gay book in the original literary sense, but so gay in a tragic way.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

A Writer's Wit: Conor McPherson

8/6/2020

I guess I'm attracted and repelled by isolation. It scares me. And it's why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher.
Conor McPherson
Screenwriter for film, I Went Down
Born August 6, 1971

C. McPherson

TOMORROW: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

A Writer's Wit: Haim Ginott

8/5/2020

I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
Haim Ginott
Author of Teacher and Child
Born August 5, 1922

H. Ginott

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

A Writer's Wit: Knut Hamsun

8/4/2020

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.
Knut Hamsun
Author of Growth of the Soil
Born August 4, 1859

K. Hamsun

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
Susan Cheever
Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943

S. Cheever

My Book World

Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.

There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.

A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

A Writer's Wit: Giorgio Vasari

7/30/2020

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.
Giorgio Vasari
Author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
Born July 30, 1511

G. Vasari

TOMORROW: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

A Writer's Wit: Susan Blackmore

7/29/2020

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.
Susan Blackmore
Author of The Meme Machine
Born July 29,1951

S. Blackmore

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

A Writer's Wit: Gerard Manley Hopkins

7/28/2020

I am soft sift
     In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift
     And it crowds and it combs to the
          fall . . . .
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Author of The Windhover
Born July 28, 1844

G. M. Hopkins

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life