Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 51

"My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson" by Sidney Rosen

My Voice Will Go with You is a nonfiction collection of essays.
Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That's because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious. The book illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior--immediately. The accompanying commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story is effective in changing behavior.
My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My new humorous novel Christmas Karma will be released in paperback and Kindle on November 8th, and you can find these audio clips on BoychikLit.com.

Read more in my review of this book on Goodreads.com.
Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

Holiday Book Release "Christmas Karma" Promotion

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Goodreads Book Giveaway Christmas Karma by Gerald Everett Jones Giveaway ends October 20, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win Gerald Everett Jones
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"Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 6 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson is a nonfiction survey of what few facts are known about the famous playwright.
Shakespeare's vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000. But – get this -- when Shakespeare couldn't find an appropriate word, he just made one up.
In fact, he gave about 800 words to us. Among these are: abstemious, assassination, barefaced, excellent, zany, and countless others, including countless.
Shakespeare's familiar turns of a phrase included: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, be in a pickle, the milk of human kindness, salad days, and foregone conclusion.
Turns out, the two biggest influences on our language have been The King James Bible, a brand-new book in Shakespeare’s day, and his plays.
Hey, read anything by Bill Bryson. He knows a thing or two.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. You’ll find many humorous turns of phrase in my novel Mr. Ballpoint, and you can catch these audio clips on BoychikLit.com.
Read more about Bryson's Shakespeare.

Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

"Right Ho, Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 5 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles


Set in the Roaring 'Twenties, Right Ho, Jeeves by the British humorist P.G. Wodehouse is a collection of stories about a young wealthy gentleman, Bertie Wooster, and his manservant Jeeves. Bertie is well-meaning, but lazy and not particularly bright. He freely admits Jeeves is the brainy one. Bertie always makes a mess of getting a chum out of romantic or money trouble, and Jeeves always comes up with a some cockeyed scheme that saves the day.
Just after World War I, the male population of Europe had been decimated by the war. Bertie’s comic fear of his dowager aunt reflected the reality that much of England’s  private wealth was then in the hands of older women. Young men like him who had been infants during the war were so appalled by the state of the world that they coped by acting like bratty little boys who refused to grow up.So – avoid responsibility, romantic entanglements, and financial conundrums. Fear marriage and anyone in uniform. Pursue amusement, particularly if a practical joke will end in what Bertie’s chums call a "good wheeze." Fraternize with like-minded adult males who, despite their elevated social standing, aspire to remain boys. Encourage food fights, but only with dinner rolls so as not to create a mess for which responsibility would have to be assumed. Coordinate rugby scrums in the clubroom, but only if fragile crockery has first been cleared. Solving real-world problems (such as romantic entanglements) by way of practical jokes and stratagems might not work but it's always worth a good try.Our world – like his – is anything but silly these days. But sometimes what Bertie called a “good wheeze” is just the thing to put a chap right.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. You’ll find some silliness in my novel Mr. Ballpoint, and you can listen to these audio reviews on www.boychiklit.com.
Read my longer review of Right Ho, Jeeves here and on Goodreads.com.
Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

"Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan

Boychik Lit Book Reviews = No. 4 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles
 
Sweet Tooth by Ian MacEwan is a British spy novel about and narrated by a female operative. She’s a bright, Cambridge math wiz recruited by the secret service to mislead an aspiring novelist into becoming an anti-Communist propaganda tool. It’s not about murder or mayhem so much as violence to the truth – the dirty business of government-sponsored disinformation. No big surprise, she falls in love with him and they begin an affair. Problem is, she can never bring herself to tell him that he’s her joe and she’s playing him for a fool. But it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that eventually this plot gets pulled inside out, when we learn the novelist has been spying on her all along. In the end, it’s all about betrayal – as all good spy novels are – about the lies we tell to get what we want while protecting ourselves. I think you’ll enjoy Sweet Tooth , but you might not ever look at your sweetheart quite the same way again.

For Boychik Lit, I'm Gerald Everett Jones. Pick up my new humorous novel Mr. Ballpoint, and follow my rants on BoychikLit.com.

Cross-posted to Goodreads.com

Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

Gerald talks with Chris Poublon on WCAP radio Midday Cafe

Host Jack Baldwin was under the weather that day, so producer Chris Poublon interviewed me on the air for a full 20-minute segment. Chris had received an advance review copy of Mr. Ballpoint, and I believe him when he said he read it and was thoroughly entertained. We talked about the Pen Wars and about why there aren't more father-son comedies. I was also able to describe how one of  huckster Milton Reynolds' promotions backfired when he inscribed hundreds of pens with "I Swiped This Pen from Harry S. Truman."

Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

'The Sense of an Ending' by Julian Barnes

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 2 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles Three years ago, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes won Britain’s top literary prize. You will either be fascinated by this book, or it just might infuriate you.
Main character Tony Webster is middle-aged and reflecting back on his life. Just when he thinks he has it all sorted, he has to cope with troublesome consequences from choices he made as a young man. He has to face the possibility that he may have been responsible for his best friend’s death, and he may be the father of an illegitimate child.
The two people who know the facts are gone. The third isn’t talking, and her diary, which could have revealed everything, is probably lost.
Barnes shows us how Tony rewrites history so as to make himself the hero of his own story. Or, at the very least, justify his actions. And, so do all of us. Families, communities, and nations continually adjust the favorable light on their actions over time.
Why might you be infuriated? Because, bravely I think for an author, Barnes provides only the sense of an ending.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. Read my hilarious new novel Mr.Ballpoint, and follow my rants at www.boychiklit.com.


Full Review (cross-posted on Goodreads.com)Spoiler Alert!In terms of overt clues and Adrian's equation, Adrian had an affair (perhaps not so brief, near the end of his life) with Veronica's mother Sarah, who bore the child, also named Adrian, who was later sent (after Sarah's death?) to a caregiver facility.
I think what nags at Tony at the end is that there are other possibilities that could fit the evidence better. Unless Veronica spills it, or Adrian's diary is not burnt after all, Tony can never know for sure. In all scenarios he's guilty, in some achingly more than in others.
The child could have been Veronica's by Adrian or by Tony. The memory of the trip to the river seems to imply a night of unprotected, romantic sex. Sarah might have cared for the baby when Veronica couldn't, or wouldn't. Veronica's pregnancy would have been when she and Adrian were newlyweds. He might have died thinking the baby was his. Or sure that it wasn't. Or not sure at all and tormented by it.
Tony says the child (seen now as a young man) looks like the presumed father, his old friend Adrian. But did Tony look like Adrian? Is Tony looking into a mirror and denying the familiarity he sees? Is Tony's remarking on the resemblance a clue to throw us off the track?
The child could have been Sarah's by Tony. This strange possibility best explains: 1) Sarah's bequest, 2) Veronica's rage, and 3) Sarah's enigmatic parting gesture to Tony, implying a secret they shared (that she'd seduced him during the visit). The fact that Adrian has repressed the memory of the sex act (but not the washing up after) would seem totally implausible, except in the context of this book which is all about how our minds rewrite history to suit our opinion of ourselves.
It's a mind twister, and credit Barnes for giving plenty of clues but being brave enough to perplex his readers by providing only the sense of an ending.  Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
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'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 2 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles


Radio Script
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides poses the question: “Does a love story that ends in marriage have any relevance today?” Time was, back in Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century Britain, whether the heroine snagged the man of her dreams made all the difference. He would be handsome, tender, and – best of all – rich. Doesn’t sound too P. C. does it? But that’s essentially the plot of chick-lit novels like Sex and the City.In a man’s take on the subject, The Marriage Plot hinges on a love triangle first joined on a college campus. There’s a shy man who wants to help starving children, a neurotic woman who has a big heart, and a brilliant biochemist who has serious mental problems. Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on.Bad news for self-help gurus who are helping you make plans. Way to make God laugh.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. Read my hilarious new novel Mr.Ballpoint, and follow my rants at www.boychiklit.com.
Full Review (cross-posted on Goodreads.com)
Masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre "campus novel." That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

Then there's the theme of semiotics. I studied with Roland Barthes (yes, I'm that old) and back then I don't think the term semiotics even existed. At least, I don't recall his ever having used it. But he talked incessantly about structuralism, that a novel is a long sentence spoken by its author, a literary construct waiting to be parsed. Understand, I didn't get any of this from him back then, just from what others, including Susan Sontag, have written about him since. His lesson plan was built around Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," which is the engrossing tale of a man obsessed by an opera star who turns out to be both a castralto and the "kept woman" of a powerful priest. But why Barthes chose that story for his criticism totally escaped me at the time, and I can only surmise now what his intentions were.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There's a similar concept in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in which the narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous, because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgements, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost. (An astute Goodreads commentator observed that Eugenides was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace, a brilliant novelist who suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide.)
Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv

'Forever Panting' by Peter De Vries

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 1 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles


I coined the term boychik lit after the Yiddish word for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. It’s a counterpoint to chick lit - humorous novels like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City – about young women on the make. Boychik lit is about young men on the make, but also popular with mature men who want to remember being young and on the make, as well as women of any age who apparently find the foolishness of all men funny.
Classic as boychik lit – which I recommend for a short read and a good laugh – is the 1973 novel Forever Panting by that master, Peter De Vries. It’s about an out of work actor who divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law, putting real spin on the old adage, “Careful what you ask for.”
And here it is. Not easy to find. Some public libraries will have it. Some banned it long ago, and perhaps no one there remembers why.



Forever Panting, one of my all-time faves, was first published in 1973. The godfather of boychik lit, De Vries is hopelessly politically incorrect these days. For example, his Slouching Towards Kalamazoo is about a high-school boy who runs away with his comely teacher. You simply cannot go there now, so have life and lawsuits imitated art in the years since.

Raised in a Christian fundamentalist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago, De Vries held notions of humor that typically involved religious hypocrisy and suburban adultery. His Mackerel Plaza is about a widower minister whose late wife was so saintly and highly regarded, he fears her reputation might get in the way of his plans to marry the church secretary.

For extra credit: Who is writing such stuff now?Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
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Remembering Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosinksi, author of The Painted Bird and Being ThereI studied with Jerzy Kosinski at Wesleyan University when I was an undergraduate. He was occasionally a guest lecturer at the College of Letters. Then in my senior year, I took his seminar on Camus and Sartre. He was a Jewish emigre from Poland, and he had been educated both in the Soviet system and then later at Columbia University. I don't have specific memories of anything he said, except - notably - this:
"The only moment of true freedom I ever had was in the airplane suspended between the two great collective societies."Gerald Everett Jones
La Puerta Productions
www.lapuerta.tv