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Two-Week Staycation or Holistay?

8/18/2020

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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

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Kon-Tiki: A Wondrous Naiveté

8/14/2020

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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
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M. E. Pearson

My Book World

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​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

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A Writer's Wit: George Packer

8/13/2020

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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
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G. Packer
TOMORROW: My Book World: Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki
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A Writer's Wit: Chris Bohjalian

8/12/2020

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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
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C. Bohjalian
FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki
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A Writer's Wit: Charles M. Blow

8/11/2020

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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
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C. B. Blow
FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki
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Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

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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
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B. Marling
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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

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A Writer's Wit: Conor McPherson

8/6/2020

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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
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C. McPherson
TOMORROW: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life
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A Writer's Wit: Haim Ginott

8/5/2020

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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
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H. Ginott
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life
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A Writer's Wit: Knut Hamsun

8/4/2020

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