Each year the International Cultural Center at Texas Tech University—located in the campus's museum district—hosts in its gallery a juried show of photographs taken in arid and semiarid locales throughout the world. I am pleased to say that of 50+ displayed photographs, I placed 10th as an honorable mention. You may view this photograph in several places:
1) By clicking here at my website www.richardjespers.com/photos.html
2) Clicking here to view an online display of all the winners: www.depts.ttu.edu/international/events/2025/high_and_dry/
3) If you live in West Texas you can see these photos in person at the ICC.
Enjoy viewing! RJ
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MY BOOK WORLD![]() Bucknell, Katherine. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. New York: Farrar, 2024. In 2016, I Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading included about 4,500 published pages of Isherwood’s journals, all edited by Bucknell. Now she has created an exquisite biography of the author. Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing (5). At first, I thought I would run into a lot of repetition, but I soon discovered that Bucknell’s scholarly work had thoroughly investigated Isherwood’s life from beginning to end—as a biographer should. From Isherwood’s point of view, for example, he only knew his father until the man was killed in WWI, when Isherwood was little more than eleven. Bucknell fills in those blanks for readers: lets us know what a sensitive man the father was and how, as long as he could, he nurtured Christopher’s artistic personality. The hole left in Isherwood’s life was one that would never be filled. Christopher Isherwood was as openly gay as a man could be in his era (b. 1904). By his own accounting he went to bed with over 400 men (from Germany to the UK to the USA). He loved his sexual life. Even when he had a lover/partner, he often had trysts with other men. Yet “[h]e saw from the outset of his career that he must make homosexuality attractive to mainstream audiences if he was to change their view of it, and he worked to do this in all his writing in different ways” (9). I believe he succeeded. Within the glory of the Gay Liberation days of the 1970s, the man was in his sixties, yet he still continued to grow, and he was admired far and wide by younger gay men (my generation) for his pioneering life and work. He was in constant demand for teaching and speaking gigs, which he labored to keep, not only for the remuneration but for the communication it afforded him with others. This tome is one of the most eloquent pieces of literary biography I’ve ever read. If readers wish to learn about one of the finest twentieth-century writers working in English prose, this book is a fine place to begin. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ford Madox Ford WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Lucy Worsley THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ronan Farrow FRI: My Book World | Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as told to Gwen Robyns Up Next:
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WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Barbara Amiel THURS: A Writer's Wit | Joan Didion FRI: A Writer's Wit | Jason Reynolds MY BOOK WORLD![]() Maupin, Armistead. Michael Tolliver Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. This is a pleasant bookend to the seven-book (I think) series. Michael Tolliver, now in his mid-fifties, is married to a man twenty years his junior. The novel comes full circle, chronicling Michael’s mother’s death (and their prior reconciliation) and the near-death of Anna Madrigal, who Michael considers more his mother than the woman in Florida dying of cancer. Loose ends are also tied up with Mary Ann, who flies in to see Anna in her hospital bed. If you’re really into the series, this book may seem a bit bland, but I do believe it brings a suitable finality to the series’ characters who for so long have inhabited 28 Barbary Lane and environs in San Francisco, the City. TUES DEC 3: A Writer's Wit | Michael Musto WEDS DEC 4: A Writer's Wit |Barbara Amiel THURS DEC 5: A Writer's Wit | Joan Didion FRI DEC 6: A Writer's Wit | Jason Reynolds HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
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MY BOOK WORLD![]() Cunningham, Michael. Day: A Novel. New York: Random, 2024 (2023). The novel revolves around one day, yet the same date, in 2019, 2020, and 2021: April 5. Right away one might recognize these years as the before, during, and after of the COVID pandemic and US lockdown. But, of course, the novel is more complex and more flexible than that (the disease serving more as wallpaper than plot substance). Cunningham fluidly explores the dynamics of two couples and their families. Dan and Isabel live with their two children, Nathan and Violet, and Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, age thirty. Only not for long, because Robbie is off to Iceland to live by himself in an (understandably) cold little cabin. The other family is comprised of Garth (brother to Dan) and Chess, and their son—not quite a family because Garth does not live with his wife and child (who now acknowledge that Garth is the son’s father). Both families seem to be coming apart but readers aren’t sure why (perhaps, in part, it is because of the pandemic, invisible but insidious). Cunningham explores their dynamics quietly and assuredly so that by the end readers have a good idea of what has gone on in their lives, before during and after the pandemic. The last few chapters are each mere paragraphs long, providing a soft-landing denouement. Cunningham is the best. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Sepetys WEDS: A Writer's Wit | President Joe Biden THURS: A Writer's Wit | Andrew Sean Greer FRI: My Book World | Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives
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WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whoopi Goldberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Roland Martin FRI: My Book World | Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel ![]() Alvarez, Julia. The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2024. I loved the author’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. It was quite poignant and enlightening to learn about the culture of the Dominican Republic. In this recent work, readers deepen their knowledge of the DR. Noted author, Alma Cruz inherits a questionable piece of property in her homeland (she selects the sorriest of four plots, her three sisters fighting over the “better” properties). There she encloses the land and forms a cemetery, not for bodies, but for her manuscripts of untold stories—primarily for the characters, whom she feels are as deserving of an eternal home as humans. The characters come alive from DR history, one being dictator Trujillo’s wife, Bienvenida. But there are lesser ones whose lives are just as interesting: Pepito, Manuel, Filomena, and more. It is a book of some complexity, so I know I shall return to it again to gain full advantage of its treasures. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Naomi Wolf WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whoopi Goldberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Roland Martin FRI: My Book World | Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel Up Next:
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WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Maria Shriver THURS: A Writer's Wit | Guy Gavriel Kay FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel MY BOOK WORLD![]() Aronson, Louise. Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. If this book wasn’t a best-seller in 2019, it should have been. Easy to read and digest, the book explores the entire scale of one’s life: birth, childhood, adulthood, middle-age, young-old, and old-old. Aronson boldly shares her experiences as a doctor who loves working for and with the elderly. She reveals that when people hear the word “old,” they think: wrinkled, bent over, slow moving, bald, and white hair. When people hear the word elder, however, they think respect, leader, experience, power, money, and knowledge. The book isn’t entirely anecdotal; Aronson weaves in lots of data, lots of science, much of it contradicting the current (and for the last fifty years) “wisdom” on how to treat the elderly (mostly by isolation and medicating them as if their bodies were still younger). With the population of elders in this world only growing by the day, she calls for a new way of thinking about the old. New ways would treat the elderly as individuals, as if their lives still mattered, not just their bodies. Physicians don’t mind keeping the old bodies alive; in fact, they almost insist on it. Yet they don’t necessarily want to handle the rest of the old body: the brain, the emotions such as loneliness, fear, and anxiety. I read this while a loved one of mine (an elderly) was in the hospital and now rehab. The author’s words helped tide me over, so that I might make better decisions for him. Again, well worth the time. Aronson is a fine writer, an excellent physician, but most of all, a caring human being. I wish she were my doctor. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ida Tarbell WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Maria Shriver THURS: A Writer's Wit | Guy Gavriel Kay FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel Up Next:
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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 Archives
January 2025
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