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Happy Thanksgiving

11/26/2019

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Crime Pays Less Than Writing

11/22/2019

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 A WRITER'S WIT
Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice. 
​George Gissing
Born November 22, 1857

On this day in 1963, also a Friday, people over a certain age will recall the assassination of John F. Kennedy. How the tragedy still rings down the hall of our history. RJ

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G. Gissing

My Book World

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Israel, Lee. Can You Ever Forgive Me: Memoirs of a Literary Forger. New York: Simon, 2008.

This slim tome of 129 pages is both amusing and instructive. A woman with a biting wit, Israel writes both apologetically and un about her career as a professional forger. Of course, the author of three previously published books, Israel does not intend to take such a path. She always has earned her living as a writer—having never so much as waited on a table—and believes she always shall. She is shocked when any sign of a new book deal vanishes. As she and her cat become destitute, and, because she is such a fine writer and also a small collector of letters, she believes she can succeed in forging letters of celebrities. Yet, as she expands her business, she realizes she cannot do it alone and signs on a colleague who turns out not to be as tough as she is, nor as smart, and she is arrested. Due to having a competent attorney and a kind judge, her sentence is reduced to community service and a five-year probation. She lives out her life working as a copy editor for a children’s publishing company and dies in 2014. The film starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant seems to fulfill the truth of the book.

FUTURE BOOK PROFILES: Benjamin Moser's biography Sontag
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A Writer's Wit

11/21/2019

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We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.
​Arthur Quiller-Couch
Born November 21, 1863
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A. Quiller-Couch
TOMORROW: My Book World | Lee Israel's Can You Ever Forgive Me?
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A Writer's Wit

11/20/2019

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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
​Nadine Gordimer
Born November 10, 1923
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N. Gordimer
FRIDAY: My Book World | Lee Israel's Can You Ever Forgive Me?
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A Writer's Wit

11/19/2019

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Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, “It was a perfect script for she and I,” inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, “Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?”
​Dick Cavett
Born November 19, 1936
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D. Cavett
FRIDAY: My Book World | Lee Israel's Can You Ever Forgive Me?
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A Curious Harper Lee

11/15/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
It is the mystery that lingers, and not the explanation.
​Sacheverell Sitwell
​Born November 15, 1897
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S. Sitwell

My Book World

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Cep, Casey. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. New York: Knopf, 2019.

This fascinating book unfolds by way of three sections. In the first, Cep brings to life a decades-old Alabama story of insurance fraud in which one Rev. Willie Maxwell begins buying up life insurance policies on relatives and others close to him. If that isn’t unusual enough, then each one of those persons begins to die in car “accidents” or by other strange circumstances. Even stranger, Cep makes clear, is that for some reason law enforcement cannot seem to pin these crimes on the prime suspect: Willie Maxwell. When Maxwell attends the funeral of the last victim, a relative of the deceased pulls out a revolver and kills the minister.
 
The second section of the book is about the attorney who not only helps the minister stay out of prison for years previous to the murder but who is so skilled that he gets an acquittal for the minister’s murderer. The attorney himself is a colorful figure, a liberal Democrat who throws caution to the wind and runs for office. After he wins, his actions are too liberal for some and he is harassed (in a dangerous KKK style) out of office, never running again. Along the way, he makes friends with author Harper Lee, known for her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
 
The reason the two become acquainted is that Harper Lee is attempting to write a book, à la her friend Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, about the Reverend (The Reverend also being her working title). After all, when Mockingbird was finished, Lee had little to do, and not yet much money, so Capote hired Lee as his assistant to help him research his book. And what a great assistant she was. Cep makes clear that, in all, Lee offers Capote at least 150 pages of typewritten notes. Her talent is combing the physical landscape for specific details; his has more to do with affect, interviewing the related parties, getting them to open up. Lee spends years apparently applying the same journalistic skills to the Maxwell case, but she ultimately abandons the book, believing she just doesn’t have enough information to make it a great book. Cep’s portrayal of Lee is one that readers may not be familiar with: an alcoholic (she eventually, unlike Capote, gets clean); a millionaire who lives, in some ways, like the poorest among her; someone who writes because she loves it, not because she must make a living from it; her own kind of philanthropist, taking care of people and causes she believes in.
 
Cep weaves together these three strands into one compelling narrative which contributes to even a larger picture: a last gasp of the Old South and its many, many contradictions. A descendant of a slave who allegedly kills members of his own race. A liberal attorney who attempts to evolve the white race in his home state of Alabama. And a writer, childhood friends with Truman Capote, who may be more Libertarian than Liberal, never really finding her rightful place in the American canon of literature.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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A Writer's Wit

11/14/2019

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You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down . . . some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
​Aaron Copland
Born November 14, 1900
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A. Copland
TOMORROW: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
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A Writer's Wit

11/13/2019

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Good things come to those who wait . . . far too long.
​William Gibson
Born November 13, 1914
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W. Gibson
FRIDAY: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours
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A Writer's Wit

11/12/2019

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Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles,  and see that the world is moving.
​Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Born November 12, 1815
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E. Stanton
FRIDAY: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours
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Of the Reader's Bondage

11/8/2019

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Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
​Margaret Mitchell
Born November 8, 1900
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M. Mitchell

My Book World

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. New York: Doubleday, 1936.
“It sings, it has color. It has rapture. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticize or regret.” —Theodore Dreiser
​The blurb above appears on the dust jacket edition of the novel I read. In its foreword, the author explains, in part, why he writes the novel:
“I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. They came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my walks, at rehearsals, at parties, they became such a burden to me, that I made up my mind there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down in a book” (iv)
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My central response to the novel is that, knowing Maugham divorces his wife and lives in a domestic setting with two different men, I believe the book is the perfect portrayal of a closeted homosexual or bisexual male. Like many Englishmen of his period, Philip Carey attends all-boy schools, and Maugham describes some of these young men in lustrous detail, whereas his descriptions of females are not as pointed or glowing. Carey’s relationships with women are fraught with one of two modes. The woman, such as his mother or his aunt, is motherly and nurturing or she, like two women he becomes involved with romantically, are not nurturing. In fact, one, Mildred (portrayed by Bette Davis in the 1934 film), tests the limits of credulity. Yet, when aligned with the profile of a closet homosexual (trying hard to fit into heterosexual life), may be quite accurate. Philip is convinced he loves Mildred and rejoins with her several times after she rejects him, and, except for the final fling, always takes her back no matter how cruel she has been, in one instance, wrecking his apartment and destroying all of his valuables, including paintings he has made or bought. This character knows, even if he has carnal relationships with women, he should not get married. “In Paris he had come by the opinion that marriage was a ridiculous institution of the philistines” (276). When he finishes medical school, he wants to travel, see the world. He only chooses to marry on the last page of the book, when, at last, he has matured and realizes he must settle down. 
 
One other observation about the novel I would make is that, in contrast to how fiction writers have worked for the last fifty years, Maugham tells a great deal more than he shows. He spends many, many pages, sometimes, foreshortening a long period of time or era in Philip’s life. Of course, as a playwright, his dialog is on the mark and believable, and the characters do act out some of their emotions, but many times Maugham takes the short-cut of telling the reader how the characters feel. Yet, I do have to say that Maugham does manage to hold my attention for over five hundred pages, and that is saying a lot.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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A Writer's Wit

11/7/2019

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Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this. 
​Guy Gavriel Kay
Born November 7, 1954
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G. Kay
TOMORROW: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
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A Writer's Wit

11/6/2019

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It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.
​Colley Cibber
Born November 6, 1671
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C. Cibber
FRIDAY: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
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A Writer's Wit

11/5/2019

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But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography—in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move.
​Thomas Flanagan
Born November 5, 1923
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T. Flanagan
FRIDAY: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
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Adverse Childhood Experiences: LifeLong Problems

11/1/2019

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 A WRITER'S WIT
Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.
​Jessica Valenti
Born November 1, 1978
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J. Valenti

My Book World

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Nakazawa, Donna Jackson. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal. New York: Simon, 2015.



This important book states its expressed purpose early in the introduction:

“Cutting-edge research tells us that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. Far more often, the opposite is true: the early chronic unpredictable stressors, losses, and adversities we face as children shape our biology in ways that predetermine our adult health” (xiii)
​Author Nakazawa spends the entire book demonstrating how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can and often do, depending on the individual, have detrimental effects on a child’s physiology—not just his or her emotional or psychological well-being. In fact, the research she sites shows that such havoc can also damage one’s DNA. And in so doing, that broken DNA can be passed along to one’s children—setting up a chain of continuing abuse by which one damaged adult injures his or her own children and so on. The author makes clear that while ACEs are similar to PTSD, they are not exactly the same. Adverse events happening to the adult brain have a different effect than the ones that happen to the child’s brain, particularly if very young.
 
There are a number of compelling aspects to Nakazawa’s book. One, she brings to light a large number of case studies to make her point and follows them throughout. You begin to hear about “Kat” in the beginning and you learn in the end how her life improves. Two, the author cites a great deal of cutting-edge research on the topic. For example, studies show that women, by a significant percentage, who consult a doctor concerning their history of ailments are dismissed by male doctors as being flaky or hysterical (common treatment throughout history). And finally, the author devotes an entire section of the book to treatments, because with appropriate care and therapy, the brain, which is plastic, can be retrained. Individuals can and do recover from Adverse Childhood Experiences. I highly recommend this book to be your first if you are exploring the topic.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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