Marfa Book Company

Add the Marfa Book Company to the Bookstores We Love category.

Everything is cooler in Marfa, Texas. The small West Texas town at the foot of the Chinati Mountains has long been a hotspot for artists and hipsters, and it just looks like a West Texas town is supposed to look. “Giant” was filmed in the vicinity, as were parts of “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” more recently. Marfa’s is a sparse beauty, but in my book it is definitely beautiful. (If you go, I hope you like landscapes that are thousands of shades of khaki and almost nothing else.)

The minimalist sculptor Donald Judd bought Fort Russell just south of Marfa when it was decommissioned by the U.S. Army in the 1980s. He turned it into the Chinati Foundation, a massive art installation that provided the perfect backdrop for a large collection of his brushed-metal and concrete boxes, along with the works of several other sculptors and painters. It’s probably my favorite place to look at art, and it’s the main reason that Marfa has registered on anyone else’s radar screen. By itself, it created a critical mass of hip art lovers with cashflow–just the sort of folks you’d want around if you opened a great bookstore like this one.

We visited Marfa this past weekend for the first time in about 15 years. It hadn’t changed in fundamental ways since the last time we were there, but there were some obvious transformations afoot. On the downside, the hipsters have driven real estate prices through the stratosphere. But on the upside, they also support the Marfa Book Company.

The MBC has a children’s section that is worlds better than anything available to us in Fort Worth, a city that has, according to my calculations, a population roughly 300 times the size of Marfa’s.

Satisfied customers

It also has an art and design section that’s better than anything I’ve seen in a bookstore outside of Manhattan. (This amazing book in the photography section captured my attention–how had I never heard of it before?) And the best Texas history section I’ve come across in the last few years. Plus perfectly good standard fiction and non-fiction sections. And a really cool gallery space. And hats and t-shirts for sale. All in all, it’s a remarkable place.

Special double bonuses: Just down the street, you can pick up a great cup of joe and a nice used book at The Brown Recluse, which is owned by a poet who happens to be an FOB (Friend of the Blog). Awesome accommodations in Marfa are available at the newly refurbished Hotel Paisano, whose interiors were featured in “Giant,” and the Thunderbird Hotel, which is owned by the couple that runs the award-winning and way-cool Hotel San Jose in Austin. I highly recommend the Indian Lodge, about 60 miles north in Fort Davis. Marfa is about 90 miles north of Big Bend National Park–so make a week of it. You’ll be glad you did.

To do tonight

The Georgia Center for the Book is hosting an event with Charlie Cobb tonight. Cobb is the author of a magnificent new travel guide to the American civil rights movement, On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail. What makes this book special, in addition to Cobb’s great writing, is his own insider history as one of the unsung heroes of that movement.

Cobb was a student at Howard University when he was drawn into the black freedom struggle. He ended up taking a few years off from his studies in the early and mid-1960s to organize rural blacks and register voters in the Mississippi Delta. His analysis of the situation African Americans faced in that part of the world helped convince the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (the group with which he was affiliated) to invite privileged white students into the state as volunteers for the monumental Freedom Summer project.

Cobb was the first to suggest the creation of the Freedom Schools, the parallel institution that taught a value system diametrically opposed to the one taught in Mississippi’s segregated public schools. The Freedom Schools were the enduring legacy of the Mississippi movement and only the most important development in American public education in the last half of the 20th century. But you won’t learn too much about the Freedom Schools, or about Cobb, from most American history books. (There are some exceptions: He has written about his story here, and a few historians of the Mississippi Movement, like this one have written about his organizing in some detail.)

The Georgia Center for the Book couldn’t be easier to find or get to. It’s in the Decatur Public Library, one block off the square and one block from the MARTA station. Tonight’s event features a great writer AND a significant historical figure. Two for the price of one!

The Audacity of Hope

I fell in love with Barack Obama during his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and even more in love after I watched this speech.

He’s been my favored candidate for president ever since he announced, I’ve given him a little money, and I’ve expressed my enthusiasm for him in various ways. I knew about his general biography and could mark his spot on the political spectrum, but I couldn’t honestly say that I knew exactly what sorts of specific policies he would pursue, or what kind of leader he was likely to be, if elected president until I read The Audacity of Hope.

Suffice it to say that I like what I read.

I don’t share all of Obama’s beliefs and values — I’ve given up on trying to find candidates who match my beliefs and values perfectly — but we’re pretty close in this regard, and after reading this book I have a deep respect for how Obama developed them. For instance, I don’t share his religious faith, but I get it. I understand why he’s made the choices he has made, and I deeply respect the mature and intellectual way that he decided to become a practicing Christian. (It had nothing to do with political calculations, by the way.) I also appreciate the fact that he remains skeptical and doubtful about his faith, in addition to everything else in his belief system. We could use somebody in the White House who’s a little less certain that he’s carrying out god’s will.

Obama’s politics come across as deeply rooted in a particular value system, but remarkably non-ideological. I can only paraphrase the distinction he draws, because I don’t have the book in front of me, but it boils down to using a value system to help him assess the facts that present themselves in the real world — and perhaps adjusting the value system to the facts, instead of the other way around — and not using an ideology to filter out the inconvenient facts and concentrate on the ones that buttress the ideology. I’d like to have a president like that.

Best of all, the guy is a fantastic writer, even if he sometimes uses twelve words when three will do and his prose, like some of his politics, sometimes edges toward the purple. (Call me naive, but I believe he wrote every word in this book.) Can you imagine what it would be like to have a president who can not only read, but write, books? Keep hope alive!

I signed an online endorsement that compares Obama to JFK. But I think that misses the mark. I honestly believe that if elected, Obama would think more like Lincoln and govern more like FDR. That’s high praise, since those two are in my judgment far and away the greatest presidents in US history, and I don’t say that lightly.

I hope Obama wins in Iowa tonight, then wins the nomination and the general election. But I’d also like to see him as a Supreme Court justice or the Senate majority leader. So if he loses, I’ll live and I’ll expect bigger and better things from him in the future. But I sure hope he wins.

The Best Non-fiction I read for the first time in 2007

My 2007 best-of list includes several books that were published in the recent past, but I only got around to reading this year. It includes a few that I read for job-related reasons, but I think others outside of academia could and should enjoy them.

Here’s my Top Ten:

Imperial Life in the Emerald City. I’m not quite finished with this one, but it’s already one of the most maddening books I’ve ever read. If you read it and get so mad at your government that you stop paying income taxes and the IRS prosecutes, don’t blame me. Blame Dick Cheney. Or Donald Rumsfeld. Or Doug Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks famously described Feith, the Pentagon official responsible for postwar planning in Iraq as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” This book makes it clear that Franks was being charitable.

The Wild Trees. The best book I read this year. Something about Preston’s prose makes me sit up a little straighter.

From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice. This fresh look at King recasts him as a democratic socialist who also happened to be a black leader. It’s a striking intellectual biography.

Freedom Riders.  The best narrative history of the civil rights movement I know of, it combines two compelling but different stories: the drama of the freedom rides and the less noticeable but equally important long-term organizing of the black communities through which they traveled.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. My students in an honors US history survey course loved this book. It deserved all of the major awards it won last year.

What is the What. I guess this belongs in non-fiction. Whatever it is, it’s a remarkable book.

Death in the Haymarket. Another book that I’ve assigned to a class, this is a timely reminder that Americans have been dealing with (and overreacting to) terrorism on home soil for a while now.

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. As Ed Ayers, a terrific historian himself, writes in this review, Lemann “tells a story we keep trying to forget.” The period of Reconstruction and “Redemption” was doubly damaging for the US: not only did the people of the US not take advantage of the window of opportunity they had to remake a slave society after defeating the CSA, they have mischaracterized and misunderstood the period ever since, learning none of the lessons they (we) should have learned from it.

The Dangerous Book for Boys. I’m psyched to tie some knots, build some forts, start some fires, etc., using how-to guides from this book, with my boys when they get a little older.

And since a Top Ten list has to have ten items: About Alice. I actually haven’t read this one yet, but I mean to, and I feel like I knew Alice Trillin from Calvin Trillin’s essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and in other collections over the years. Trillin is my favorite writer about one of my favorite subjects, food. Of all the people I have never met — and there are billions of them out there — Trillin is the one person I would most like to take to Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, for barbecue. His food essays are about food, sure, but a lot else besides. Take this one, which at first glance is about the difference between take-out food in New York and San Francisco (and a paean to the Mission burrito, one of the great inventions of the last two centuries). But it’s really about how deeply he loves and misses his daughter — and Alice, whom Trillin had recently lost when he wrote this.

I feel bad about my gunshot wound

I was looking forward to the movie version of No Country for Old Men. Okay, I’ve been obsessed with the movie version of No Country for Old Men ever since I heard it was in the works and couldn’t wait to see it. I don’t get to the theaters much anymore, but any time my favorite filmmakers adapt a novel by my favorite novelist, they’ll get my $9.50.

I’m on record as saying that this wasn’t Cormac’s finest book. I wouldn’t rate No Country in Cormac McCarthy’s top five, or even eight, novels, but it lent itself exceptionally well to adaptation for the big screen and the character Anton Chigurh was one for the ages. That much was obvious going in.

I couldn’t wait to see how the Coens would do three things:

1) Depict what is really the main character in the story (at least the first half of it): the bleak West Texas landscape;
2) Depict Chigurh, truly one of the most original fictional characters I’ve ever come across; and
3) Be faithful to the tension-building atmosphere Cormac created in the novel. I thought that if they could remain true to the long stretches in the novel without any dialogue, they’d create a masterpiece.

The verdict: the cinematography was austerely gorgeous. Javier Bardem as Chigurh was treeeee-mendous. And the Coens created a masterpiece. (Compare it to Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. It’s not a fair fight.)

When I saw the movie last week it had been more than two years since I read the book, so I couldn’t place every single scene and compare it to how Cormac had written it, but I didn’t much care. By the end of the movie I honestly couldn’t tell where Cormac’s vision ended and the Coens’ began. I mean that as the highest compliment. I thought the ending, which has been criticized elsewhere, was perfect.

So I was thinking about what I wanted to say about this movie and wondering if I could recommend it to someone who hasn’t read the novel or formed a — well, obsession with McCarthy’s fiction, when I read Nora Ephron’s parody in the New Yorker. I think that pretty well answered my question.

Special bonus: If you’re a Coen bros. fan, you may have an experience like I did during the most chilling scene of the movie, the one where Chigurh makes a convenience store clerk call heads-or-tails for his mortal soul. (It’s in the trailer.) I kept having flashbacks to the “No, unless’n round is funny” scene from Raising Arizona. The people sitting around me in the theater couldn’t figure out why I was laughing.

Double-special bonus: my local newspaper reports that John Turturro is working with the Coens on a spin-off of The Big Lebowski, which will explore the character The Jesus.

The Sockman

There are lots of great things about living in Intown Atlanta (as opposed to the suburbs, where I grew up). If I had to choose the one best thing about living in Intown Atlanta, I would probably say it’s being able to load up on socks while riding MARTA to and from work. And if you happen to drive on Memorial Drive with any regularity, you don’t even have to ride MARTA to get your sock fix. You can buy 100 socks (50 pairs!) for the low, low price of $10 at one of the many parking-lot sock dealers that line the thoroughfare.

I always wondered who the Sock Mogul was behind those dealerships, and my curiosity was definitely piqued the day a man carrying a big box full of something entered my MARTA train car and announced, “I stopped smoking rocks and started selling socks!” How could I not buy some? And who was this guy?

The AJC solves the mystery.

The medium is the message

I’ve made no secret of my disdain for graphic novels. I just think that life is too short for grown people to go around reading comix. But Slate has just published one that I can finally get behind: a black-and-white comic about a cartoon figure who saw the world in black and white.

The Worst Hard Time

I came for the social history. I stayed for the weather porn.

The Worst Hard Time is New York Times reporter Timothy Egan’s historical account of the Dust Bowl and the people who lived through this country’s worst extended environmental disaster on record. The term “Dust Bowl” refers both to a region that extends from the southwestern corner of Nebraska down through western Kansas, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, and into the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, and to a collective weather phenomenon, the dust storms that tore out the southern Great Plains’ topsoil over and over again and blew “black blizzards” from roughly 1933 to 1937.

This climate catastrophe was almost entirely man-made. As late as the turn of the 20^th century this regional ecosystem was in relatively perfect balance. The buffalo (and the American Indians who hunted them) had been removed from the plains by this time, but they had been replaced for the most part by cattle ranches. The native grasses that held the soil in place remained. This is not an insignificant point. People tried to get rich quick by plowing this part of the plains under to plant wheat when World War I caused the price of that commodity to spike, and it profoundly upset the ecological balance that had been in place for eons.

The Dust Bowl region historically received less than 20 inches of rain a year. The late teens and early 1920s were unusually wet, but when drought hit in the 1930s the ecological destruction reached a tipping point. Winds, which were strong even in a normal year, tore out the plowed topsoil, which created dust storms, which created a chain reaction that seemed to cause the storms to intensify. Americans of the time tended to blame the storm on the fickleness of Mother Nature, but they could have blamed it on their own hubris–which was supported by the federal government’s homesteading policy. The New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service (remember when people understood that government could solve problems, as well as cause them?) began to right the ship.

Egan says that he wrote the book to give voice to the people who weathered these storms. He succeeds in doing that, and uncovers some true American originals. But the most compelling character in the drama by far is the storm that seems to happen in an endless film loop over a span of years. It’s just about impossible to exaggerate how devastating these storms were, and the statistics Egan throws out every so often throughout the narrative are mind-boggling. Here’s one representative example: in the year 1935 alone, dust storms ripped out the equivalent of 8 tons worth of topsoil for every man, woman, and child in the United States from the Dust Bowl and deposited it… god knows where (mostly, it appears, in the Atlantic Ocean). The people affected by the Dust Bowl didn’t receive much attention from the powers that be until a freakish 1934 dust storm system traveled all the way to the East Coast and browned out New York and D.C.

As an academic historian I’m forced to tut-tut a bit about calling this a “history.” Egan did a great deal of research for this book, much of it in regional archives, and his book is much richer for the local flavor he culls from oral histories (in addition to his own interviews) with Dust Bowl survivors. But, like another great writer in this genre, Erik Larson, he has the habit of “reproducing” conversations that took place decades ago between real historical people, even though he wasn’t there to hear the conversations and no one else recorded them. So these “reproduced” conversations aren’t really historical, but they’re clearly not fictional, either. (For an interesting discussion of Larson’s speculation-as-history, see this excerpt of an op-ed that first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.)

I’m content to call this a “non-fiction narrative” that deserves all of the awards it has received and leave it at that. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in American social history during the Great Depression and anyone thinking about climate change and man’s effects thereon. Above all, if I say “Jennifer Lopez” and this is who you think of first, The Worst Hard Time is definitely the book for you.

Don’t Stop Believin’

Okay, I watched the Separate Ways video three times last night and twice again this morning. I swear to god, no one will ever produce anything in any medium that can entertain me as much as that can, ever.

Every time I watch it I find something else that cracks me up. The drummer always kills me—absolutely kills me. The half-assed efforts at air keyboards rip my guts out every time. The slo-mo bass playing tickles my funny bone. All of the scenes with Steve Perry attempting to appear earnest and intense are always good for a chuckle. God bless Steve Perry and his stupid mullet, but he’s really trying in this thing. I promise you, this will never get old. The bassist’s mustache. Neil Schon jumping off a forklift and onto his knees to get that last little oomph out of an axe solo. I could go on.

But, gun to my head and hand on a bible, I’m going to have to say the scene from the 1:08 to the 1:23 mark, where the drummer (who woke up that morning in a cut-off t-shirt that appears to say “Foosball Athletic Department” and said, “Fuck it, I’m wearing this to the shoot”) can’t remember if he’s playing air drums or air guitar, is my absolute most favoritest part of this video ever. I don’t know if the chronology would support this theory, but it’s possible that he’s playing the entire performance as an homage to Harry Shearer’s work in This is Spinal Tap.

I’d love to meet the director and pick his brain, as it were. What does the ending mean? Why did you film it at a wharf? A keyboard against a wall?! How many suppositories did you give Steve Perry before you rolled the cameras?

In short, I think this music video is why they invented the tubes for the internets—so we can still watch “Separate Ways” in Music Week 2007.

Falling Man

“It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads….

“The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office papers flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.”

It’s not quite “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” the first line of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (an opening line that I’d place up there with “Call me Ishmael”), but it certainly captures what it was like to watch the twin towers come down on 9/11. This is the subject of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: This was the world now.

DeLillo views this incomprehensible, unexplainable geopolitical event and its human aftermath through the prism of a dysfunctional marriage, the male half of which, Keith, trudges down several flights of stairs after the first airplane hits the south tower where he works as a contracts attorney, through lower Manhattan, and to the apartment door of Lianne, the wife from whom he has been estranged for weeks. Without speaking a word they begin their marriage anew.

Most of the book centers on their halting efforts to become a family with their son, Justin, again. At least one critic has faulted DeLillo for creating such a shallow, unattractive protagonist in Keith. I took a different view: Keith was shallow before 9/11, and it’s probably entirely human of us to think that living through such an event should make Keith come through it with a determination to devote himself to humanity. But it seems just as likely to me that a guy who lives to play poker with his buddies before a tragedy would only want to play poker with his buddies after the tragedy. In my experience many, perhaps most, people are not self-reflective, and tragic events like this don’t automatically lead to self-reflection. Even so, Keith has multiple chances throughout the plot of the novel to break out of himself, as it were, but he never quite does. DeLillo offers a devastating clue as to why he doesn’t at the end of the novel.

DeLillo also makes an honest yet not fully developed attempt to understand the motivations of the hijackers. (One of the minor characters in the novel even makes a halfhearted attempt to justify terrorism on the part of the weak in an asymmetric relationship with the powerful, but this idea isn’t played out completely.) I found his attempts to understand the hijackers as three-dimensional human beings brave, and the sections where he writes about them surprisingly moving. (For this, he will surely be attacked by Bill O’Reilly any day now.)

By far the most moving accounts in the book for me were the ways that Justin tries with his friends to make sense of the attacks. If you read the excerpt in the New Yorker a couple of months ago you got the gist of this, but it nailed me again when I read it for the second time. Fifty years from now adults like Justin are still going to be struggling with how they reacted to the attacks on the twin towers, and I have to think that they’ll still be reading Falling Man to help them figure it out.

Don DeLillo is one of my favorite authors, and I’m glad that he chose to tackle this subject. I somehow come away from this book thinking that it’s not the best one he could have written about it, but DeLillo’s not-quite-best is a heckuva lot better than most. The title character, for instance, comments on American life in a way that only DeLillo could have invented.

The Road

I’m trying to think of a book I have read that has as bleak a moral and physical landscape as the one Cormac McCarthy creates in The Road. The only one that comes close is Blood Meridian. That’s also a Cormac McCarthy creation. No Country for Old Men might be in the ballpark. Also Cormac’s. So, even though I did my best to avoid reading reviews before I had tackled this for myself, I knew what I was getting into. (And, if you’re not as crazy as I am about McCarthy’s body of work, I don’t think I could recommend this book to you.)

Set in the eighth year of the G. W. Bush presidency an unspecified post-apocalyptic future time, probably in nuclear winter, The Road balances the sublimely tender relationship between a father (The Man) and his son (The Boy) against the ashen, inhumane world through which they travel. This world is nearly devoid of animal and human inhabitants, and those that have survived cause one to question the iron law of natural selection; they’re not exactly the best and the brightest. Existence in this novel is just short of pointless. In fact, it’s not clear why either of these characters exists in the world at all, except to be there for the other. That’s not the cheeriest message you could find in this holiday season, but you could surely do worse.

I think it’s probably fair to call McCarthy’s novels misanthropic, though that’s not quite the word I’m looking for. But strangely, I guess, the other hallmark of his writing, at least for me, is the genuine warmth and humanness between characters that McCarthy portrays via their speech. The cowboys’ repartee in all three of the Border Trilogy novels, but especially in The Crossing is, I think, some of the best and most memorable in American fiction; I would put it in Twain’s class.  (I don’t have All the Pretty Horses in front of me, so I can’t quote it directly, but as I recall, one of the young cowpokes, Rawlins, I think, says by way of explanation, “You know what a blivet is, don’t you? A blivet is ten pounds of shit in an eight-pound sack.”  That should really enter the lexicon.  Exhibit A, George W. Bush is a blivet.) My fondness for the back and forth between the title character and Harrogate in Suttree is boundless. In The Road these kinds of conversations are completely stripped down and raw, but packed with emotional intensity.

What will stick with me from this book may not be the characters or the plot, but the circumstances under which I discovered them. When I read fiction these days I usually do it with a sporting event on in the background. The crazy juxtapositions of images from this novel and whatever was on the tv screen at the moment I happened to look up from the page were truly disorienting. The image of more-than-half-dead people attempting to escape a makeshift jail where they’re being held by cannibals, for instance, jangled up against the backdrop of a Broncos-Seahawks football game. (In the end, it was comforting to be able to move from the surrealism of the one to the banality of the other.) At one point I decided that maybe I didn’t really want to read a description of people roasting a prematurely born infant over a campfire at that particular moment, put the book down, and found my 3-year-old son beaming as he showed off a picture he had drawn of an auto carrier. (Quite good, if I do say.) The feeling I had at that moment was pretty close to the overriding emotion that comes forth again and again from The Man in this novel: I will do anything for you.

As I said, sublime.

We Are All Dook Haters Now

Recent events make it all too easy to hate the University of New Jersey at Durham, all of its students and sundry alumni. The rich northern kids, the entitled attitudes, the obnoxiousness that serious dook watchers have all known and loathed for years came bursting out for all the world to see this spring. Now hating dook is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I remember a happier time, a more innocent time. A time when thinking Americans could hate dook for less tawdry reasons. Will Blythe does, too. Will Blythe is the former fiction editor of Esquire Magazine, a native of Chapel Hill and Carolina alum, and a dook-hater of the old school. He remembers where he was when Jeff Capel hit a half-court heave to send a 1995 UNC-dook game to overtime. (I remember where I was, too: in a sports bar in Austin, drinking beers on the Austin Duke Alumni Club’s bar tab, and making fun of the members of the Austin Duke Alumni Club; Carolina won the game, by the way.) He can tell you what the weather was like at his house when Walter Davis drained one from about 30 feet away to complete an 8-point comeback against dook with 17 seconds to play in a 1974 contest. He has dreamed up 101 ways to murder Dick Vitale. The man knows his Carolina-dook rivalry. (I can tell, because not only does he hate the same dook players that all diehard Carolina fans hate, he hates the same Carolina fans that real Carolina fans hate.)

What separates Blythe from your run-of-the-mill basketball fan is the rather sophisticated philosophy he has developed to rationalize his obsession: Blythe posits that human beings can find true happiness only by hating someone or something totally. Embrace that base instinct and give in to it. Blythe, like all thinking Americans, hates dook basketball and its execrable, rat-faced leader.

Blythe is an exceptionally funny writer. I am fully prepared to admit the possibility that only maniacs and people with lots of time on their hands would read To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever, but I do believe it will find a wider audience with fans of sport generally and readers who enjoy unadulterated acerbity. (I wrote in a previous post that Warren St John was the writer best able to describe the experience of being a fan. Well, Blythe is better.) If you read this far, you might like it, too.

I read a piece on the Carolina-dook rivalry that Blythe published in Sports Illustrated about 4 years ago, absolutely loved it, and waited for this book to come out. And waited. And waited. And then read it the week my pre-ordered copy from Amazon finally arrived. It was well worth the wait, even if the Sports Illustrated piece, published here as a prologue, was the best part of the book.

What can I say? I am a dork; this book validated everything I hold dear. I know that at least one BGBer has close ties to a dook alum. I urge her to forsake the darkness and come to the light.

Get your orthography on

So, did anybody attend the spelling bee at Manuel’s Tavern? We need a report. (My best bet for the current-events word: surveillance.)

Tort Reform

Nothing new to add to this story, but schadenfreude compels me to comment on Dick Cheney’s blowing of a cap into the ass (face, actually) of a longtime stalwart of the Republican Party here in Texas.

I never thought I’d write this, but I’m jealous of Dick Cheney. I’ve always wanted to shoot a Republican.

I do love the way this is being described in the news accounts: Cheney “peppered him” with shot. The guy is in the ICU, but he was only “peppered.” It probably tickled.

Peace Out

I always figured that the members of Skull and Bones determined each year’s nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. But according to a recent story on NPR, elected officials from various nations including this one, as well as professors of history, philosophy, political science, theology and international law are eligible to nominate away to their hearts’ collective content. For instance, this year that august pool has nominated, among others, Oprah Winfrey and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, founder of the Crips. (Or is it the Bloods? I get them confused. Oh, Tookie.)

Dr J happens to be employed in one of the above fields (barstool philosopher), and is willing to forward ideas to the prize committee. The Suggestions Window is now open.

700 Lbs.

Wow. The total number of books in New Mexico just increased by 20%.
It’s interesting that this lady lives in Los Alamos, of all places. I think she’s da bomb.

What is it with these perverts?

And why can’t we beat them?

Add Scooter Libby to the long list of freakshow Republicans who have published deeply strange fiction. The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins weighs in here.

You can also get your mitts on some hot pioneer lesbo action by pointing your browser to this site excerpting Lynne Cheney’s tome. [Ed. note: whitehouse.org is a tongue-in-cheek site, but this book is real. I only wish I was kidding.]

This Other Book That I Read

Cormac McCarthy could have written No Country for Old Men with one hand tied behind his back. For all I know, he did.

This is not a terribly noteworthy book in the scheme of things, but only Cormac could possibly have created the character Anton Chigurh, one of the more depraved and violent (and memorable) fellows to come down the literary pike in recent years. (Chigurh’s philosophical statement at the end of the book, which came out of nowhere, absolutely slayed me.) [Read more after the jump]

Cormac writes violence better than anyone, but there was nothing in this book that could hold a candle even to the knife fight or the dog hunt in Cities of the Plain, for instance. And, I have to agree with many of the critics who said that in this case the violence was devoid of morality. It served to show off his flashy writing chops more than any exploration of a moral code.

No Country took the edge off my Cormac jones, so it served its purpose. I’ll be able to contain myself until he bangs out another book that could compete with any of the Border Trilogy novels. But it’s a far cry from Blood Meridian or Suttree. There was a time in my life when I considered buying crates’ worth of Suttree and just handing out copies to strangers on street corners, and I still think of images from that tale and laugh out loud to myself. Sometimes I cast the movie version in my head. It’s that good, and I’m that weird.

Suffice it to say that I won’t start pricing grosses of No Country anytime soon.

P.S. Kudos to Cormac’s editors at Knopf, or whomever is responsible for his jacket covers. They’re always excellent.

This Book that I Read

I happened to read Warren St John’s Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer a couple of weeks ago. In addition to being the book whose title I have least enjoyed trying to explain to other people who asked me what I was reading, it’s an interesting and funny insider’s chronicle of one season with the Alabama fans who follow their football team around the Southeastern Conference in their recreational vehicles. St John has some funny observations about his fellow Alabama fans, a few trenchant ones about upper-middle class whites who follow the doings of working- or lower-class African American teenagers who play football for “their” team, and more than I ever wanted to know about RVs.

But what he mostly has is the best descriptions I’ve ever seen of the conversations intelligent sports fans have immediately after their team loses the Big Game: Why do I let these stupid things control my feelings? Why do I fall for this year after year? Why do I care about these humps? Why do I waste my time on this foolishness?

Those are conversations I have with myself every year oh, about… now.

I Pity the Jewels

Say it ain’t so, Mr. T.

If you forgo the bling, then the hurricane has already won.

In other news, the mohawked one has begun counselling parents not to send their undergrads to dook, Wake Forest, or Arizona State. Why? Because dook blows. Also, because the three schools’ mascot names promote Satan.