(You can still read our review and an excerpt from the book.)

I wrote Joe Nick and asked him how the book is doing. Here's some of what he had to say:

"I taped Bob Edwards on XM on Friday and an hour later went on live on Bill Mack's Open Road truckers show on XM. Bill loves the book and has Willie on to take calls from truckers every Wednesday. Evidently, Willie spoke very highly about the book on the show, according to Bill, which is sweet considering it was unauthorized. Ex wives, one of the daughters, favorite nephew, and old friends have weighed in. My favorites were Jackie Clements and Faye Dell Clements. Faye Dell was Willie's girlfriend in high school before she began dating Jackie. Willie always said Jackie got Faye Dell because he had a car. Anyhow, I dropped a book off on Monday and Friday Jackie called. 'Faye Dell wants to talk to you,' he said, handing the phone to Faye Dell.

"She said, 'I just wanted to tell you I've read the book straight through. The only time I've done that before is John Grisham's first novel.' She approved of the work, and I figured if anyone knew Willie Hugh, she did. "

Joe Nick adds:

"One thing I've concluded after hearing more and more great stories from people at signings: everyone has a Willie Nelson story and most of them are true."

Sure, it's just a big promotion. But it's nice to see a legendary children's book character get a place of honor at a $1,000-a-night hotel. (For that price, I assume they throw in a set of books. And read them to you before the staff tucks you in and says night-night.)

(Associated Press photo)

Why am I telling you this now? Because tickets go on sale today.

Not surprisingly, given the topic, she has been generating some national attention, from the likes of the respected Bookslut blog and even Library Journal.

She discusses the book in this YouTube video. (The video itself is tame, but the related videos on that link are of a hide-the-kids variety.)

At The New York Times, Janet Maslin raved (while mimicking his style:)

"He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time."

At the Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin ripped it:

" Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah. "

"Ultimately, though, it is still what's on the page that matters, and Bright Shiny Morning is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining."

Clearly, the only answer is: America needs more book reviewers, and editors, to help us sort things out.

Can I get a witness?

(AP Photo/Terry Richardson,HarperCollins)

The lucky thinkers for 2008-09 are:

The official bio says: ""He has been a contributing writer for the Texas Observer since 1999. As a freelancer, his reportage, essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Science, Rolling Stone, Lingua Franca, The New Scientist, Seed, Technology Review, The North American Review, the Austin Chronicle, and many other publications."

(As luck would have it, I dined with him at the Texas Book Festival, and I can say he's just the kind of person you'd like to see out on a ranch, thinking deep thoughts.)

Vanessa Ramos, whom the press release calls "a poet, playwright, and creative-nonfiction writer. As a McNair Scholar, she completed an ethnographic study (Women Between Earth and Sky) on curanderismo or folk-healing in the Southwest. Her awards include a Many Voices residency at the Playwrights' Center (2006 - 2007) and a Loft Mentor Series Award in Nonfiction (2005 - 2006). Her play, Cuentos, Stories, was showcased at the Waring Jones Theater in 2007.

She is working on "a collection of memoir-driven lyric essays that explore the relationship between landscape and memory."

Want to apply for next year? Your deadline is Jan. 15, 2009.

So this is one form of reading material that I am not disappointed to learn is being supplanted by the Internet. (I still enjoy reading about pending books, mind you; I personally find the book catalog an inefficient way to learn about upcoming material.)

Hillel Itale explains:

NEW YORK -- A publishing institution, faithfully mailed at least twice a year to thousands of stores and libraries for about as long as the industry has existed, may be on its way out: The paper catalog.
HarperCollins announced Monday that it was planning to make their listings of upcoming releases available only online, calling the current system both economically and environmentally indefensible.
"I think we are overdue. We produce thousands and thousands of catalogs, many of which go right into the wastebaskets," HarperCollins President Jane Friedman, who said the switch would likely begin by summer 2009, told The Associated Press. "It's such a waste of paper and so inefficient."
Other major publishers are moving in a similar direction, including Penguin Group (USA) and Random House Inc.
"We would do this over time and hopefully with the support of our booksellers," Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum said. "The booksellers are great traditionalists. They are environmentalists, but they are also traditionalists."
According to HarperCollins, about 100,000 catalogs -- a print run worthy of a best-selling novel -- are sent for each publishing season: summer, winter and fall. Friedman notes that besides saving money and paper, online catalogs can be updated instantly to reflect changes in price and cover art and can include other media. The Harper catalogs will offer links to reviews, interviews, audio excerpts and promotional video.
"It's not brain surgery to come up with this idea," Friedman said.
Cecile Fehsenfeld, who co-owns the Michigan-based Schuler Books, said HarperCollins and other publishers had met with booksellers in March and discussed e-catalogs. She said the response was mixed.
"The general consensus among booksellers was that they are very wedded to a paper catalog," said Fehsenfeld, who likens the paper catalog to reading a traditional book.
"Booksellers like to sit around the table with the catalogs. They thumb through them and make notes. It's a real interactive kind of experience, so there is an emotional attachment to the current kind of catalog."
Fehsenfeld said her greatest concerns were that the transition be made slowly -- Friedman says it will -- and that rival publishers use similar formats.
Friedman said HarperCollins will be meeting with booksellers at the industry's annual convention, BookExpo America, in Los Angeles at the end of the month.
"We will talk to them about what they think they need and we will try to incorporate those needs," she said. "And if people want to download the catalog, be my guest."

The Writer's Garret says: "Prof. Dickson- Carr will define some of the key terms needed to understand what satire is and is not, and will offer a brief outline of satire's place in African American literature. Open and interactive discussion will then explore why satire has waxed and waned at different points in time, and why it is especially important now."

"I'm not a blog man," he said in his melodious brogue. "I've read two in my life. I really don't like to be sequestered in a room with a screen. I'd rather sit in a bar and listen to some guy uttering platitudes. You need time to think for yourself; I can't absorb it all anymore. A book is enough, and a bar."

Thank you, Texas Pages readers, for feeling otherwise. At least now and then.

(But if anyone has suggestions on how we can move this whole enterprise to a bar where I can get paid to utter platitudes ... I am all ears.)

(Update: And don't forget -- you can see her tomorrow when she appears with Arts & Letters Live and The Writers Studio.)

In the year 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph's wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same.

When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intact windows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.

My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he'd ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession.

This boy was to become my mother's father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves' feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the out-house, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the out-house and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped.

The out-house drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The out-house, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds' death by excrement, as well as other features of the story's beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television's knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn't hard at all to imagine him at twelve.