Texas Pages

Pardon me if I don’t get up. But “The World Without Us” has heaped so much guilt on me that I can’t.
What begins as a fascinating description of what would happen on Earth if suddenly all humans were gone (water would be the pioneer force that would work with others to bring down buildings, bridges and other constructions) goes on to describe all the ways humans are dreadful for the planet. We despoil, we destroy, we demand.
Many of author Alan Weisman’s examples of environmental havoc are from the U.S. (Add three boatloads of guilt; I live here.) He speaks of human-caused climate change (global warming is assumed) but describes weather cycles and cataclysms that long predated humans. (Subtract one boatload; I wasn’t here then.) Poor Texas! Houston’s Oil Patch gets plenty of attention for sucking resources and polluting the countryside. (Toss on two boatloads; I’m a native Texan.)
Now, I can hug a tree with almost the best of them. I don’t even kill spiders or snakes, though they scare me. And I don’t own cats, which Weisman says are nature’s serial killers. But 10 disks (12 hours, unabridged, Audio Renaissance, $39.95) of hearing how bad I am for Earth got me down, when the recording’s inconsistencies didn’t frustrate me.
I can’t blame reader Adam Grupper, whose solemn tones added appropriately to the gravity of the subject. (And environmental destruction is certainly a terrifying problem.)
I also don’t blame the author for my bleak state. I’m sure he doesn’t drive a car, use electricity, eat food from a grocery store, wear machine-made clothes or have treated water at his house. And I do.
Weisman’s point is important, and I’m happy to know that nature will reclaim the land and sea if we disappear. It couldn’t go to a better tenant.
But now? I need chocolate. Organic, please.

Here are other "winners" in said contest.

I hesitate to ask you for your own samples of terrible writing, but I think some of you might post anyway.

Runner up:
“The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the shuddering crests of the waves, atomizing it into mist that was again laid flat by the growing fury of the storm as Kevin Tucker switched off the bedside light in his Tuba City, Arizona, single-wide trailer and by the time the phone woke him at 7:38, had pretty much blown itself out with no damage.”
— Scott Palmer, Klamath Falls, Ore.

James Frey's embellishments would never have been exposed if Oprah hadn’t sponsored his book. Then, notoriety, zoom. Sales, zoom. Fortune, zoom. Scrutiny, zoom. Scandal, zoom. Because there was money involved, an Internet company specializing in exposing misbehaving celebrities showed him to be a nice guy who had not in fact done these trashy things. On Larry King Live he was reduced to insisting that he was, too, a jailbird and he was, too, a drug addict and alcoholic and the scumbag he said he was. And people ought to stop slandering him by saying he didn't do these scummy things.

This whole strange episode, once again, demonstrates loud and clear how education has failed. The vast multitudes are literalists and believe something is factual or it is untrue. Despite being greatly moved and even changed for the better by this book, they were distraught to learn that they hadn’t been moved or changed at all—because Mr. Frey was not literally as wretched in reality as he had implied in his book. Humanity expect artists to do their agonizing for them. Mr. Frey was supposed to be their scapegoat, and guess what? He didn’t suffer as much as he said he did, maybe not all. He didn't live up to the artist's job description.

So there was but one thing to do. Bring him back onto the show and make him suffer anyway, in public, according to the Puritan Code. Oprah, indignant, had assembled a panel of Grand Inquisitors, and when they were done torturing this Ignacious Reilly of a man, he was probably thinking about how sweet the gas pipe would be about then.

And there was another motive at work. People were angry about lots of things they couldn't control, not the least of which being lying politicians. Was John Kerry a war hero or a cowardly traitor? Did President Bush serve honorably and punctually in the Texas National Guard or was he AWOL? Did he abuse drugs or just alcohol? Were the reasons he gave for invading Iraq true or were they lies?

Did he embellish his story of why he took America to war and if so how is he different from Mr. Frey except in scale? But Oprah couldn't haul President Bush onto her show and give him a colonoscopy with a red-hot poker.

Oh, well. If James Frey didn't really do our agonizing for us, at least he was a good victim.

Now, here's news from my personal favorite writing contest of the year.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A Wisconsin man whose blend of awkward syntax, imminent disaster and bathroom humor offends both good taste and the English language won an annual contest Monday that salutes bad writing.
Jim Gleeson, 47, of Madison, Wis., beat out thousands of other prose manglers in San Jose State University’s 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this convoluted opening sentence to a nonexistent novel:
“Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ’permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee,” Gleeson wrote.

"J.K. Rowling gets the last laugh on the dwindling number of conservative Christians who have attacked her "Harry Potter" saga over the past decade: The most important plot point of the seventh and final book is unambiguously Christian. "

So begins Jeffrey Weiss' opinion page comments that appeared this weekend.

This just in: Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III will be signing Soul Fitness 7 p.m. Tuesday at Friendship-West Baptist Church, 2020, W. Wheatland Road, Dallas. (He's pastor of the 9,000-member congregation, says the press release.)

Texas has a new writers residency, courtesy of Austin literary nonprofit Badgerdog. This is in addition to programs sponsored by the Lannan Foundation in Marfa and Dobie Paisano near Austin. The word at Glasstire is that Charissa Terranova of SMU and The Dallas Observer is taking over the resurrection and management of the UTD Artist-in-Residency program which previously hosted writers. Should be interesting to see how Dallas' AIR program evolves. Keep an eye also on La Reunion....

Here's the story on that J.K. Rowling chat, from The Associated Press:

LONDON — Just because J.K. Rowling has stopped writing about Harry Potter and his friends and foes doesn’t mean she has stopped thinking about them.
She told fans Monday what she thinks happened to many of the book’s characters after the final installment.
In a 90-minute live Web chat, she fielded some of the approximately 120,000 questions submitted by devotees. It was her first public comment since “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — the last book in the series — debuted on July 21.
Rowling said she was elated to share with fans the secrets she’d been harboring since she conjured up the idea for the boy wizard during a train journey across England in 1990.
“It is great to be able to do this at last,” she said. “I’ve looked forward to it for so long!”

J.K. Rowling's Bloomsbury.com chat on Monday morning elicited many answers to questions that were left hanging at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

One of the biggies: Who was supposed to perform magic late in life? Read all about it on The Leaky Cauldron's website.

Photo of J.K. Rowling: The Associated Press

The first interesting bit of fallout from Nan A. Talese's comments at the Mayborn this weekend -- amid all the expected concerns about telling the truth, it seems many readers share her opinion that Oprah was harsh.

You can post your own thoughts here.

Here's a story about her comments appearing in tomorrow's paper.

Another quick post to say that the conference overall was earning raves from participants. To a person, speakers from around the country were impressed with the quality of the discussion and the way the conference's focus on nonfiction gives a clarity of purpose to the event.

Joyce Carol Oates, the brightest of the literary lights on the program, delivered a keynote that was, for the first half, worthy of a slightly confused college professor, as she sifted through piles of notes and gave a halting history lesson of the modern narrative.

Then, she opened up and discussed her own writing, focusing on how she came to write "On Boxing." And she sounded like the literary superstar she is.

Her history lesson did contain an exhaustive reading list. We'll be sorting our own pile of notes and attempting to post that later.

Excerpt from Peony in Love by Lisa See. Used by permission of Random House.

Two days before my sixteenth birthday, i woke up so early that my maid was still asleep on the floor at the foot of my bed. I should have scolded Willow, but I didn’t because I wanted a few moments alone to savor my excitement and anticipation. Beginning tonight, I would attend a production of The Peony Pavilion mounted in our garden. I loved this opera and had collected eleven of the thirteen printed versions available. I liked to lie in bed and read of the maiden Liniang and her dream lover, their adventures, and their ultimate triumph. But for three nights, culminating on Double Seven— the seventh day of the seventh month, the day of the lovers’ festival, and my birthday—I would actually see the opera, which was normally forbidden to girls and women. My father had invited other families for the festivities. We’d have contests and banquets. It was going to be amazing.

Here's an online-only review of a page-turned called "Bad Monkeys," by Matt Ruff.

Excerpt from Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West by Michael Punke. Used by permission of HarperCollins.

J. Wright Mooar, a young man from Vermont, traveled south and west with a fellow hunter until, in the Panhandle of Texas, they found their buffalo, “millions upon millions.” “For five days,” remembered Mooar, “we had ridden through and camped in a mobile sea of living buffalo.”

There was excitement at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest tonight as Nan Talese, publisher and editorial director of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, gave a passionate defense of "A Million Little Pieces," by James Frey.

Specifically, she criticized Oprah Winfrey and her fans. She says the book remains essentially true and that readers need to trust their own intelligence when reading such material.

We'll have more later, both on her remarks and on the rest of the conference.

Here's a look at what's coming up in Sunday's Guidelive:

Lisa See's "Peony in Love" offers a love/ghost story from 17th-century China, while two other works -- “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself,” by Young-Ha Kim, and “Girls of Riyadh,” by Rajaa Alsanea, take a look at modern love from different corners of the globe.

Closer to home, "Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West," by Michael Punke examines one man's struggle to save an American icon -- the bison.

And speaking of icons, how did William Shakespeare become SHAKESPEARE? "Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard," by Jack Lynch explains.

Plus, columnist Judy Alter talks to Rick Riordan.

Look for it all Sunday.

When I saw "She: Bike/Spoke/Love" on the schedule at the Texas Unbound Literary Festival," I wasn't sure what to expect. An e-mail from Tammy Gomez explains:

"She: Bike/Spoke/Love" is a new work that will bring hip hop theater aesthetics to the stage, with onstage bicycling, a turntablist, graffiti-influenced set design, and spoken word. As well, this play will introduce the radically-new performance concept of 'bicycle theater' to Texas which will show the positive aspects of bicycling and to celebrate bike communities that are sprouting up all over Texas at this moment in time."

Now we know.

Catch her Sunday at the Undermain Theatre.

Washington Post op-ed columnist David Ignatius had a nice essay today about the pleasures of reading novels, especially in the summertime. Enjoy...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/25/AR2007072501879.html?referrer=emailarticle

As spotted on the GalleyCat blog, the Baltimore Sun says that comfy seating may be on the way out at some of your favorite chain stores.

Is this a big deal? As someone who grew up in places where Waldenbooks and B. Dalton set the standard for bookstore ambiance, I've always enjoyed how luxurious the modern bookstore chains felt by comparison. But I could never cozy up to them. They tend to be neat and orderly places of commerce, where you can find a book you want quickly and conveniently. Unlike, say, a good used book store that smells of dust and yellowed paper and just a hint of mold, where the bookseller keeps inventory in a spiral notebook and may or may not be at the counter when it's time to check out.

That's the kind of place where I want a chair, so I can sift through a stack of unearthed treasures and decide how much I can really afford. So if Barnes & Noble wants to replace that green couch with a shelf of new fiction -- it won't affect my life much.

(Dallas Morning News file photo)

Are we still obligated to give spoiler warnings?

OK, here's a spoiler warning. But the person doing the spoiling is J.K. Rowling herself.

Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer-winning "The Looming Tower" is due out in paperback Aug. 21. I never got around to picking up a hardcover edition, and I'm looking forward to reading this one.

Especially after seeing his performance at the Dallas Museum of Art this spring. I recall leaving with the feeling that every American, no matter what their politics, needed to listen to what he had to say.

For those who missed it, here's John Freeman's interview with Joyce Carol Oates. She'll be in town this weekend for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest.
(The deadline to purchase tickets has passed, but we're planning some blog action over the weekend. Stay tuned.)

This question is thrown out for everyone who did NOT read ... that book.

We've already discussed favorite children's books. This week I'm wondering -- if you could select one title to receive attention from every media outlet in the land and send 12 million buyers into a frenzied weekend of reading, which one would it be?

For the sake of not starting any wars, let's rule out religous texts. (We have another blog for those discussions.)

I've now had three local reports -- two from the chat, one from a co-worker -- of copies of "Deathly Hallows" that are missing pages.

Nationally, Scholastic has only acknowledged a few hundred problematic copies, says the Associated Press. (See the previous blog entry.)

Are you one of the victims? Let us know.