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HIGHWAYS OF THE SOUTHWEST

9/15/2023

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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
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A. Christie

My Book World

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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


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TRAPPED IN THE ATTIC

9/8/2023

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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
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G. Metalious

MY BOOK WORLD

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​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


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A Writer's Wit: Frederick Douglass

2/14/2023

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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]
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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
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Sedaris: Always a Carnival

9/23/2022

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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
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W. Lippmann

My Book World

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​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
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A Writer's Wit: Ralph Waldo Emerson

5/25/2021

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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
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R. W. Emerson
FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders
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Monette: Still the Last Watch

9/11/2020

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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
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O. Henry

My Book World

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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
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All the World is a Trick

10/18/2019

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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
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F. Hurst

My Book World

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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
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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


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