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

A Writer's Wit: Alan Jay Lerner

8/31/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
A. Lerner
FRIDAY: My Book World | Mikita Brottman's Couple Found Slain
0 Comments

Cheever: Master of Suburbia & More

8/27/2021

0 Comments

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

My Book World

Picture
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

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Barbara Ehrenreich

8/26/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
B. Ehrenreich
TOMORROW: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Martin Amis

8/25/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
M. Amis
FRIDAY: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: John Green

8/24/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
J. Green
FRIDAY: My Book World | The Stories of John Cheever
0 Comments

Melville"s Biography

8/21/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
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
Picture
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

Picture
​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!

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Veronica Roth

8/19/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
V. Roth
TOMORROW: My Book World | H. Parker's Herman Melville
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Sonia Levitin

8/18/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
S. Levitin
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hershel Parker's Herman Melville
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Julian Fellowes

8/17/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
J. Fellowes
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hershel Parker's Herman Melville
0 Comments

Residence on Pablo's Earth

8/13/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
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
Picture
V. Plame

My Book World

Picture
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

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Sue Monk Kidd

8/12/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
S. M. Kidd
TOMORROW: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Charles M. Blow

8/11/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
C. M. Blow
FRIDAY: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Barry Unsworth

8/10/2021

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
B. Unsworth
FRIDAY: My Book World | Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth
0 Comments

A 'Vixen' and Her Fox

8/6/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
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
Picture
P. Bacigalupi

My Book World

Picture
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
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: David Baldacci

8/5/2021

0 Comments

 
Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.
​David Baldacci
Author of Daylight
Born August 5, 1960
Picture
D. Baldacci
TOMORROW: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Helen Thomas

8/4/2021

0 Comments

 
All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I'm not so certain he was nice. It's hard for me to think of anyone as “nice” when I hear him say “The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.”
​Helen Thomas
Author of Front Row at the White House
Born August 4, 1920
Picture
H. Thomas
FRIDAY: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Crosley Sloane

8/3/2021

0 Comments

 
There's already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk - except they all apply to you, and all at once.
​Sloane Crosley
Author of Sad Stuff on the Street
Born August 3, 1978
Picture
S. Crosley
FRIDAY: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I
0 Comments
    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

    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
    Alabama
    Alaska
    Aldo Leopold
    Andy Warhol
    Arizona
    Arkansas
    Art
    Atrial Fibrillation
    Authors
    Authors' Words
    Barcelona
    Blogging About Books
    Blogs
    Books
    California
    Cars
    Catalonia
    Colorado
    Cooking
    Creative Nonfiction
    Culinary Arts
    Deleting Facebook
    Ecology
    Education
    Environment
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Fiction
    Fifty States
    Film
    Florida
    Georgia
    Grammar
    Greece
    Gun Violence
    Hawaii
    Heart Health
    Historic Postcards
    History
    Idaho
    Iowa
    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
    The Novel
    Travel
    Travel Photographs
    #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  ©2011-2023
                    BOOKS  PHOTOS  PODCASTS  JOURNALS  BLOG