Blog - www.richardjespers.com

NOT NECESSARILY HIS BEST

10/25/2024

A WRITER'S WIT
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
Author of White Teeth
Born October 25, 1975

Z. Smith

MY BOOK WORLD

Sedaris, David. The Best of Me. New York: Little, Brown, 2020.

Funny how authors view their own oeuvre. I’ve always been fond of Sedaris’s work, but these selections, though engaging and humorous in places, did not really seem like his “best.” His best usually contains little sentiment, yet much bawdiness and irreverence. The collection seemed too “nice.” A friend of mine, however, thought the collection “vulgar,” so there you go.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward P. J. Corbett
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Irma S. Rombauer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Katherine Paterson
FRI: My Book World | Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

CROWDED APARTMENT

8/30/2024

A WRITER'S WIT
The Dawes Act . . . destroyed the Indian land base. Indian lands in 1887 totaled 154 million acres. When the law was repealed in 1934, Indian lands totaled about 48 million acres, a reduction of 70 percent over the lifetime of the measure.
Paul H. Carlson
Author of The Plains Indians
Born August 30, 1940

P. Carlson

MY BOOK WORLD

Wescott, Glenway. Apartment in Athens. New York: Harper, 1945.

During the latter part of World War II, Germans occupy Athens, and a Nazi officer is “assigned” to live with a couple and their two children. The officer expropriates the couple’s bedroom, and they must sleep on cots in the kitchen. His every wish is their command, so to speak. Life becomes unbearable, but at one point the officer must go to Germany. When he returns to Greece, he is a changed man. Spoiler alert: his wife and two grown sons have both been killed. Though still gruff, the Nazi is softened a bit. The father is drawn into a conversation with the Nazi, and the father says something that the officer deems traitorous. He is sent off to prison where he is killed. Mired in his misery, the Nazi commits suicide, and the mother thinks there will now be peace in their apartment. But she is soon disabused of such an idea when she is falsely accused of murdering the German. Even though that situation is resolved in her favor, she then sacrifices her young son to the underground. This book was a $4 find in a used bookstore, the owners not realizing this has rare book status with the Library of Congress!

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Sarah Orne Jewett
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Wright
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Cage
FRI: My Book World | Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

MOYERS ON MOYERS ON MOYERS

7/26/2024

A WRITER'S WIT
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
André Maurois
Author of September Roses
Born July 26, 1885

A Maurois

MY BOOK WORLD

Moyers, Bill. Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time. Edited by Julie Leininger Pycior. New York: New Press, 2004.

I wish I’d read this book twenty years ago when it first came out. The author’s prescient views might have informed my future a bit. We may think that there is a lot wrong with our country now, but Moyers has us take a look at it in 1892. The People’s Party “meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin . . . . Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench . . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced . . . . The fruits of toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few” (7). Seems as if we’re reading about certain groups today. The only difference is that because of social media, “public opinion” is far from being silenced. People can say whatever they want without a shred of evidence, making “truth” even more elusive than ever.

Tom Johnson, mayor of Cleveland in the early 1900s asserts about public ownership of local transportation: “‘If you don’t own them, they will own you.’ It’s why advocates of clean elections today argue that if anybody’s going to buy Congress, it should be the people. When advised that businessman [sic] got their way in Washington because they had lobbies and consumers had none, Tom Johnson responded: ‘If Congress were true to the principles of democracy it would be the people’s lobby.’ What a radical contrast to the House of Representatives today!” (14). Yes, if today every Democrat contributed only $5 a month as “dues” to the DNC, what the party couldn’t accomplish on their behalf! Fall down on the job, and you can withhold your $5!

Consider this jewel: “Money has robbed the middle class and the working poor of representation—and as they become weaker politically, they are even more insecure in their jobs, their savings, and their future” (61). What money? you ask. Money from corporate special interests, deep-pocketed lobbyists, that’s what.

Or this one: In 2004 “fewer than half” of our population votes in presidential elections, and about a third “vote in our congressional elections—compared to 80 percent a century ago” (62). Still, only 66% turned out to vote for president in 2020, and 45% turned out in 2022 for mid-terms. Why would citizens now care less than those of a hundred years ago? Why be complacent?

Moyers ends the book with an essay on aging, which seems more pertinent than ever to Boomers, because we now make up the larger part of that demographic. His suggestion: Avoid disease and disability, maintain mental and physical function, and continue to engage with life. Amen.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ann Brashares
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whitney M. Young
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Herman Melville
FRI: My Book World | Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever: A Novel

GAY HISTORY AFTER STONEWALL 1969

3/15/2024

A WRITER'S WIT
How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, 1993-2020
Author of My Own Words
Born March 15, 1933

R. B. Ginsburg

MY BOOK WORLD

Denneny, Michael. On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2023.

Christopher Street is a place, a street that is at the heart of gay life in New York City. Christopher Street was also a gay publication that opened up life for its gay subscribers. This book is a compendium of essays that Denneny wrote for CS, or speeches he made for various organizations from the 1970s to the 1990s (mostly). Denneny was the first openly gay editor to be hired at a major publishing house: Stonewall Editions at St. Martin’s Press. During his tenure there he was responsible for publishing over one hundred titles by gay authors.

Why is this book important? For someone my age (in 1987 Denneny read a novel MS of mine and recommended to me that I should pursue the small presses—whatever that may have meant), it is a good review of history that I lived through (though not in New York). For gay people under the age of forty, it is a history from which they could learn where their gay privileges today come from. Without the courageous acts of civil disobedience in 1969, there would be no Grindr, few LGBTQIA+ films or books. No marriage. Those brave people also taught us that we must remain alert and keep fighting. There are those on SCOTUS and in Congress who would still deprive our hard-won community of its rights. In some sense, unless we at last develop a more inclusive society, there will always be a Stonewall rebellion in the offing. We should be prepared to bear arms at any time.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Garth Greenwell
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Emily Giffin
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thomas Frank
FRI: My Book World | Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac

NOT CRACKED-UP TO BE

9/29/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
Miguel de Cervantes
Author of
Born September 29, 1547

M. de Cervantes

MY BOOK WORLD

Fitzgerald. F. Scott. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson. With Letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, and John Dos Passos. And essays and Poems by Paul Rosenfeld, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, John Peal Bishop and Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1956 (1931).

There is much to admire about this collection of essays and varied materials, some written by Fitzgerald and some penned by other contemporaneous literati. The title is derived from the author’s essay by the same name, in which he rather portrays his demise as a writer. It is a bit self-flagellating, if not a bit inaccurate. The weakest part of this tome may be “The Notebooks,” in which, by category (Anecdotes, Descriptions of Humanity, Karacters, to name a few), Fitzgerald displays journal entry after journal entry. I’ve seen this done to great effect by the likes of David Sedaris in his journals (which have been carefully edited) and John Cheever’s, as well. But here, this section contains around 150 pages of material that should probably have remained private. Some entries are so fragmented as to be nonsensical (except to the author); others seem overwritten and therefore of little value to the reader. In a strange aside, I must say a number of these entries seem to speak to Fitzgerald’s preoccupation/fascination with “homosexuals”:

“I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that”(99).
“Fairies?” Really?

“Fairy who fell for a wax dummy” (155).

“He had once been a pederast and he had perfected a trick of writing about all his affairs as if his boy friends had been girls, thus achieving feminine types of a certain spurious originality” (166).
Is “he” Fitzgerald himself?

“When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own innards. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me” (169).
Honestly sounds as if the man has an identity problem.

“Fairy can only stand young girls on stage, where they’re speaking other people’s lines” (201).

“Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them” (205).

“The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out behind the window and Forrest had rum in his tea” (214).

“to Gerald and Sara Murphy
Honey—that goes for Sara too…” (282).
A nice, jocular greeting in a letter. Ha ha.

As I said, a strange preoccupation this man seems to have with gay men. He can’t decide whether he admires them or deplores them, and could he possibly be one himself?

In all, however, I wish I had read this collection while I was teaching The Great Gatsby and a few of Fitzgerald’s short stories to high school AP students years ago. Doing so might have informed my pedagogy in a superior manner.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Gore Vidal
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Heidi Hayes Jacobs
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Caroline Gordon
FRI: My Book World | Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead: A Novel

HIGHWAYS OF THE SOUTHWEST

9/15/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.
Agatha Christie
Author of Sixty-six Detective Novels
Born September 15, 1890

A. Christie

My Book World

Ventura, Michael. If I Was a Highway: Essays. With a foreword by Dan Flores and photographs by Butch Hancock. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2011.

This journalist originally from New York befriends the Southwest US, from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles; and, in turn, the Southwest seems to befriend him. In “A Life of Destinations,” Ventura says: “To be that man who only lives to live. That is my task from now on. It isn’t about writing anymore, or finding a meaning, or changing the world, or getting and keeping love, though all of that is important; but it isn’t about that stuff anymore. The task now is to be that man who only lives to live. For whom life, life, life, is enough” (15). What a great attitude!

As a Lubbockian (a term the author may have coined for no one I know uses it seriously), myself, I particularly liked Ventura’s essay, “Lubbockian Identity,” He begins this way: “Let us consider Lubbock Texas. In 1973, January through September, I lived in Lubbock—not a resident; a drifter, taking my time passing through. The Lubbockians I got to know all were Texans, mostly born and raised in Lubbock. Ethnically, most were some mixture of Anglo-Saxon-Celt, often with Cherokee stirred in a few generations back. Many traced their American ancestry to well before the Civil War” (35). But this delineation is only the beginning of Ventura’s portrayal of Lubbock—a place he likes more than he doesn’t. Will buy copies of this for friends [and I did] who don’t live in Lubbock—just so they know I’m not entirely crazy for living here!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rachel Field
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Meara
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Mark Levin
FRI: My Book World | Rachel Louise Snyder, Women We Buried, Women We Burned

TRAPPED IN THE ATTIC

9/8/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.
Grace Metalious
Author of No Adam in Eden
Born September 8, 1924

G. Metalious

MY BOOK WORLD

Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. Detroit: Gale (Thorndike), 2012 (2011).

In this spare novel told by way of the first person plural, Otsuka reveals the collective story of Japanese women who are duped into coming to the United States to marry handsome men looking nothing like their photographs. Then readers learn of their collective story, as these women and their husbands (and offspring) toil virtually as slaves in a place called J-town on behalf of California agriculture. Otsuka even takes us to the point in history when Japanese-Americans are rounded up and are entrained to detention camps “over the mountains” into states like Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, to sit out World War II as prisoners of war. These people lose everything, and, except for decades later, when their descendants may receive a token amount of $20,000 in reparations, these poor, hardworking people never receive recompense for the misery they were made to suffer because of certain Americans’ racist and provincial attitudes. A tragic story made beautiful by way of the author’s portrayal of this betrayed but noble race.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Anna Dostoyevskaya
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Judith Martin
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Bernays
FRI: My Book World | Michael Ventura, If I Was a Highway

A Writer's Wit: Frederick Douglass

2/14/2023

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. [Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. April 1886]
Frederick Douglass
Author of Escape from Slavery
Born February 14, 1817 [Attributed]

F. Douglass

Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Alfred North Whitehead
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Maureen Johnson
FRI: My Book World | Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

Sedaris: Always a Carnival

9/23/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Propaganda is that branch of lying which often deceives your friends without ever deceiving your enemies.
Walter Lippmann
Author of America Tomorrow: Creating the Great Society
Born September 23, 1889

W. Lippmann

My Book World

Sedaris, David. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020). New York: Little, 2021.

Much like Sedaris’s first journal, this one contains a mixture of “Dear Diary” items along with jokes people tell him, along with long anecdotes about people he knows, along with a certain political polemic (which I love), and more, like overheard conversations in public places. If I were teaching creative writing, I would lift portions of both of Sedaris’s diaries to demonstrate how writers can mine their own diaries for topics or scenarios for other works.

In the early part of his first diary, Sedaris is a poor writer. In this one, he is somewhat more solvent and becoming more so all the time. Now, the man is so busy with readings and lectures, he’s always on a plane, and the airport world alone must offer up some of his richest observations. His dated entries from all around the world show a man who is interested in people, what makes them tick, what makes them say the things they do. Not that he always understands, but he is curious enough to record some of the ridiculous, confounding, or even wise things they say to him. Overheard conversations. How his day has gone, if he’s at home in one of two or three dwellings he owns in England or France. How the day has gone for his husband, Hugh. Jokes. Yes, plenty of jokes people take pride in telling him at one of his readings as he is signing books.

“A guy finds a genie who grants him three wishes, adding that everything the man gets, his wife will get double. ‘Great,’ the guy says, and he wishes for a big house. Then he wishes for a car. Finally, he says, ‘Okay, now I want you to beat me half to death” (211).

“It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. ‘I’m looking for two child molesters,’ he says.
The priests think for a moment. ‘We’ll do it!’ they say” (445).

Sedaris’s title is derived from this tidbit dated March 23, 2013, London: Frank and Scott went to an Indian restaurant the other night and took a picture of the menu, which offered what is called “a carnival of snackery” (289). Indeed, that’s what this book is, and the delightful thing is it doesn’t cost you one calorie to consume!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Myrtle Reed
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elmer Rice
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Gaskell
FRI: My Book World | Jennifer Egan's The Candy House

A Writer's Wit: Ralph Waldo Emerson

5/25/2021

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics; to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social position; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived; this is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author of "Self-Reliance"
Born May 25, 1803

R. W. Emerson

FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

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

All the World is a Trick

10/18/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
Fannie Hurst
Born October 18, 1885

F. Hurst

My Book World

Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. New York: Random, 2019.

Jia Tolentino may be one of the most eloquent spokespersons for members of the Millennial generation. These nine essays cover topics, among others, concerning her informed opinions about the Internet and social media. Another essay about her short stint in a Reality TV show is more confessional in nature, and brutally honest:

“Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street” (44).

My favorite essay may be “Pure Heroines,” one in which Tolentino takes a hard look at how girls and women are treated in literature. She goes deep on this topic, examining books that are from fifty to one hundred years old: writers like Maud Hart Lovelace (whom I read in elementary school), E. L. Konigsburg, Lucy Maud Montgomery. But this discussion is to lay the foundation for her look at more contemporary literature. Tolentino’s observation is that the girl-heroines, who are brave and outspoken in childhood, become hemmed in by the sexism and patriarchy in adulthood.

“Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one . . . [f]emale literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity” (118).

Yet I also enjoyed “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” and the final essay, “I Thee Dread,” in which Tolentino declares that in her young adulthood (born 1988), she and her partner (she plans never to marry) have attended forty-six weddings, expending over a period of nine years as much as $35,000 to gift their friends, arrange for transportation to the weddings, not to mention the “uniform” and finally hotel accommodations. But if one is spending an average of $30,000 for a wedding why not expect your guests to put out their share, as well, eh? Jia’s primary objection to marriage is the inequity that awaits a woman once she crosses the threshold into wedded unbliss. Here, Tolentino deftly references her title, providing a sort of recap of her entire book:

“I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of the independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms” (289).

After that, the bride’s life is over as she splits into two personalities: one who is “large and resplendent,” and one who “vanishes underneath the name change and the veil” (290). Tolentino nails not only this vision of marriage (the thesis is not original) but she does so for her generation of women who still seem to be falling into the trick mirror of self-delusion.
NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD