www.richardjespers.com
  • Home
  • Books
  • Journals
  • Blog

'Russian Roulette' is a HOt Read

4/27/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.
​Russell T. Davies
Born April 27, 1963
Picture

My Book World

Picture
Corn, David and Michael Isikoff. Russian
    Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s  
    War on 
America and the Election of
    Donald Trump
. New York: Hachette,
    2018.

This book is a hot read, mostly because these two journalists have taken the patchwork of daily news that we all read every day and transformed all that information into a seamless narrative that is easy to understand. And important, easy to appreciate. If Americans aren’t concerned about the Russia investigation, they aren’t very concerned about the survival of their country.
 
Nuggets:

“Putin had once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ He was a Russian nationalist to his core. H wanted to extend Russian power, restoring its spheres of influence. He was an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies—or winning its approval” (31).
 
“But the feedback the U.S. official received was mostly about what the secret source had to say about Ukraine. That was the crisis of the moment. The secret sources’ warnings about Russia’s information warfare plans in the United States and Europe garnered little attention. ‘Anybody who had any doubt about Putin’s intentions,’ the U.S. official later said, ‘just wasn’t reading what we reported’” (54).
 
“It appeared that the DNC had been hit twice by separate teams of Russian cyber bandits. And the Russian hackers, CrowdStrike could tell, had been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—a host of DNC material, including emails and databases. Among the pilfered materials was the DNC’s entire opposition research file on Donald Trump.
     It was a complete compromise. There was no telling what the Russians had. Or what they would do with it” (76).
 
“And Trump Jr. touted Russian as a key source for profits. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets . . . certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York,’ he explained. ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’” (89).
 
“According to Source C, a senior Russian financial official, the Trump operation was part of Putin’s overall plan to sow disunity within the United States and the trans-Atlantic alliance. This source reported having heard Putin express his desire to return to the nineteenth-century style of ‘Great Power’ politics in which nations would pursue their own interests rather than an ideals-based international order” (147)
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-12 Virginia
0 Comments

My Journey of States-11 Maryland

4/25/2018

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
Poet Laureate of Maryland
Born June 27, 1936
Died February 13, 2010
Picture
L. Clifton
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eleventh post of fifty.

Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

Picture
L-R: Lou, Carol, Richard, Victor | 1963 Visit to DC
Picture
In 1963, I was fifteen when we visited Aunt Gladys in Washington, DC. My cousin was seventeen, and he and his sophisticated friends invited me to go with them to the beach in Maryland. On our way we stopped in at Nordstrom’s in the Seven Corners shopping center. I watched as my sophisticated cousin and his friends shoplifted identical plaid swim trunks. We rode out in a red Impala convertible, and when the traffic backed up surprisingly, the driver, one of my cousin’s friends, headed for the soft grass median rather than rear-end someone. ¶ At this Maryland beach, my cousin and his friends looked like they all belonged to the same fraternity and flirted with girls older than they were just for the fun of it. I never told my parents what my cousin had done. It was one of those events that advanced your childhood pretty quickly, traveling with delinquents, and you knew you could never go back. ¶ In the Baltimore neighborhood where my aunt and uncle lived in 1957, people attached ceramic cats, mostly black, to the roofs and sides of their homes, perhaps as a way of identifying theirs as they approached it on the street. My dad bought one before leaving for Kansas and it hung on the side of their house in Wichita for over fifty years. ¶ Maryland became seventh of the original thirteen states in 1788. Its bicenquinquagenary was celebrated in 2013. ​

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
​
4-Louisiana 
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
NEXT TIME: My Book World

Life Among the Savages Still Delightful

4/20/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
 A WRITER'S WIT
One of the advantages of the book's [The Best Little Boy in the World] having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
​Andrew Tobias
Born April 20, 1947
Picture
A. Tobias

My Book World

Picture
​Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages.
    New York: Farrar, 1948.
 
Jackson’s memoir about family life up through the birth of her fourth and final child is entertaining and timeless, though it is written in the 1940s. What contributes to this timelessness is Jackson’s grasp of the universal through developing the specific.
 
This is a woman’s story to tell, though it is for everyone to read. Jackson published many of these narratives in women’s magazines before releasing them in this book. She develops the universal by delving into the concrete. She never names her husband: it is always my husband this, my husband that, objectifying him as the head-in-the-clouds academic that he is, in the same manner in which she, as housewife, is objectified in this post-World War II period. She has pet names for her oldest three children: Laurie for Laurence (which he vehemently sluffs off at one point); Jannie for Joanne, and Sally for Sarah. It’s as if by naming them something more intimate, they cannot possibly belong to someone else, the world at large.
 
What saves her persona from being a martyr is that Jackson actually enjoys being a mother and wife while at the same time pursuing a serious career as a writer of fiction. She would be considered a permissive mother, but such a free household allows all her children to develop unfettered: Laurie is allowed to take on a boisterous, all-boy personality; Jannie develops as one who expresses herself as bluntly as Jackson herself does; and charming little Sally is a princess, who quotes fairy tales and talks in oblique sort of riddles when she is angry about something. To be sure, Jackson spars with her children (and her husband) on occasion, nudges them back and forth over the goal line, but she allows them simply to be. One would love to know how they developed as adults, and how their children fared. 
 
This free and delightful yet sophisticated read is timeless and should be perused by everyone: women and men, old and young, especially those who think they know everything about raising children. They could learn a thing or two from the late Shirley Jackson.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-11 Maryland

0 Comments

My Journey of States-10 West Virginia

4/18/2018

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
​The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia
June 26, 1892
Died March 6, 1973
Picture
P. Buck
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the tenth post of fifty.

West Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963)

Our car, accustomed to the prairies of Kansas, labored up the mountains of West Virginia, on our way to and from Aunt Gladys’s place in suburban DC. I recall some delightful cinnamon apple candy that we purchased every time we passed through a certain town (or maybe it was in Virginia). It seemed like a primitive place, but that may not be a child’s observation, but a jaded adult who, to this day, doesn’t like to pee in an outdoor closet that stinks from lye. ¶ Now that West Virginia has joined the Big Twelve, I pay more attention to the state. They’re tough to beat at home, especially when a proud bunch of fans fill up the place to cheer on their Mountaineers. ¶ West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863, when it was granted its own statehood, making it the thirty-fifth state. In 2013, it celebrated its sesquicentennial. 

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
​
4-Louisiana 
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
NEXT TIME: My Book World

Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life

4/13/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Born April 13, 1906

Picture
S. Beckett

My Book World

Picture(Liveright)
Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather
     Haunted Life
. New York: Liveright,
     2016.
 
Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success.

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).
Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.
 
Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia
0 Comments

My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania

4/11/2018

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
Dorothy Allison
Born April 11, 1949

Picture
D. Allison
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the ninth post of fifty.

Pennsylvania (1957, 1959, 1963)

Picture
Barges. Coal. Coal dust. On our 1957 vacation, my family and I spent nearly three days in the mountain town of Brownsville, waiting for our Packard Clipper, a ’55, to be repaired. My mother tried hard to find ways to entertain us while we waited around on repairs that could never be made. She took movies of us running up and down the bank of the Monongahela River, me waving a jaunty striped cap I’d gotten for my ninth birthday. “Run, darn you,” my mother said. “It’s a moving picture.” And run we did, like little fools. The hotel where we stayed was so rife with coal dust that Mother had to wipe down everything (including the toilet seat) before we could sit.

PictureThe Jesperses' New 1957 Pontiac and Brother Vic
At the end of that brief but drawn-out respite, my parents bought a new 1957 Pontiac, and we broke it in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was one of the oldest in the nation, and the roads were not that well engineered, not near as sleek as the Kansas Turnpike (you could travel at eighty mph), but it was certainly scenic. ¶ Philadelphia is the city where some of my grandmother’s German cousins lived, but when I try to google the address where they lived, it seems that the street must have disappeared or been renamed. It’s as if they never lived. The city is also where my Dutch grandparents landed in the early 1900s. ¶ Pennsylvania is the second of the original thirteen colonies, established in 1787. Over 230 years old!

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
​
4-Louisiana 
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
NEXT TIME: My Book World

March Not-Madness

4/9/2018

1 Comment

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
New York has become the single most unequal state in the country. The top 1 percent of New Yorkers earn 45 times more than the bottom 99 percent combined. Black and Latino families in New York still earn much less than white families. Women still earn much less than men. This crushing inequality isn’t something that just happens. It’s not an accident. IT WAS A CHOICE.
Cynthia Nixon
Born April 9, 1966

Picture
C. Nixon

I'm Back!

I spent much of the month of March continuing to work on a book that has already occupied two years of my time, and I only feel two-thirds of the way through it (maybe less). I spent half the month in the hill country of Texas at a dwelling known as Hacienda María. Sitting high atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley where the landlords, Native American Seed Company, harvest grass and flower seeds indigenous to Texas, this dwelling is a bit of heaven in which I could work quietly each day as long as I wished, then prepare meals in a huge, sunny kitchen, and then walk my daily 10,000 steps or more on the beautiful country roads of the hacienda property. I've returned to Lubbock refreshed and ready to continue my book as well as my blog work. I hope you'll take a look at my photos below.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania
1 Comment
    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
    My Long-Playing Records My Long-Playing Records
    ratings: 1 (avg rating 5.00)


    Archives

    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011



    Categories

    All
    Acting
    Actors
    African American History
    Aging
    Alabama
    Alaska
    Aldo Leopold
    Andy Warhol
    Arizona
    Arkansas
    Art
    Atrial Fibrillation
    Authors
    Authors' Words
    Barcelona
    Biography
    Blogging About Books
    Blogs
    Books
    California
    Cancer
    Cars
    Catalonia
    Colorado
    Cooking
    Creative Nonfiction
    Culinary Arts
    Deleting Facebook
    Ecology
    Education
    Environment
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Feminism
    Fiction
    Fifty States
    Film
    Florida
    Georgia
    Grammar
    Greece
    Gun Violence
    Hawaii
    Heart Health
    Historic Postcards
    History
    Humor
    Idaho
    Iowa
    Journalism
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Literary Biography
    Literary Journals
    Literary Topics
    Literature
    Maine
    Massachusetts
    Memoir
    Michigan
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    M K Rawlings
    Musicians
    Nevada
    New Hampshire
    New Mexico
    New Yorker Stories
    Nonfiction
    North Carolina
    Novelist
    Ohio
    Pam Houston
    Parker Posey
    Photography
    Playwrights
    Poetry
    Politics
    Psychology
    Publishing
    Quotations
    Race
    Reading
    Recipes
    Seattle
    Short Story
    South Carolina
    Spain
    Susan Faludi
    Teaching
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Theater
    The Novel
    Travel
    Travel Photographs
    True Crime
    #TuesdayThoughts
    TV
    U.S.
    Vermont
    Voting
    War
    Washington
    Wisconsin
    World War II
    Writer's Wit
    Writing


    RSS Feed

    Blogroll

    alicefrench.wordpress.com
    kendixonartblog.com
    Valyakomkova.blogspot.com

    Websites

    Caprock Writers' Alliance
    kendixonart.com

    tedkincaid.com
    www.trackingwonder.com
    www.skans.edu
    www.ttu.edu
    www.newpages.com
    www.marianszczepanski.com
    William Campbell Contemporary Art, Inc.
    Barbara Brannon.com
    Artsy.net
WWW.RICHARDJESPERS.COM  ©2011-2025
                    BOOKS  PHOTOS  PODCASTS  JOURNALS  BLOG