Strange Times

It has been a strange week in America, absolutely surreal, and the future, despite the Dow spiking at 20,000, appears to be harrowing. To keep myself from obsessing over yet another newspaper, I finished reading Icelandic writer Jon Gnarr's The Indian this evening. "Gnarr" is pronounced with a rolled "r" at the end of the word, which makes it a fun name to say. I am quite thankful to Dallas' Deep Vellum Publishing for introducing the English-speaking world to this great Icelandic writer. His book, one part novel, one part memoir, dives into the psyche of a disturbed, angry child, and I found the way the author explained the logic of the antihero to be both fascinating and illuminating.

I will now read Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, which I purchased from the front table at The Last Word Bookstore in Fort Worth last week. The novel takes place on the US-Mexico border, a land that is bound to change in the near future.

So we get a wall and Mexico gets a tariff. I hope Americans understand that this tariff will be nothing more than a shell game. When Americans are buying produce at Wal-Mart for twenty percent above the current price, I hope they understand who exactly is paying for that wall.

MLK in Texas

When I was in school, no one ever mentioned Martin Luther King, Jr., and he had no presence in the school curriculum. My first exposure was in a religion course in college. Today students learn of his legacy at an early age. While he is more closely associated with the Deep South, he did visit Texas. In fact, he even spoke at a now-defunct theater on Commerce Street in Fort Worth. This Star-Telegram story by Bud Kennedy tells about that visit.

http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article7231049.html

MLK also spoke at Fair Park in Dallas in 1963. Here is an excerpt from the book Dallas 1963.

https://www.texasobserver.org/night-martin-luther-king-jr-came-dallas/

Searching for Home

Fiction writers have their themes, even if those themes are sometimes unbeknownst to them. I, of course, am no exception. In the last couple of years I have seen my work gravitate toward a central theme that has been driven by my own preoccupation. My work these days centers around the idea of home. My stories tend to address the following questions: What is "home" in a rapidly changing world? What is "home" to a person who has returned after many years elsewhere? What is "home" to someone living between or among cultures?

Of course, much of this meditation comes from the fact that I can no longer recognize where I grew up. Fields I once roamed have become subdivisions. Creeks where I fished for crawdads have been turned to concrete. The empty highway I biked down to get to a favorite fishing hole is now a congested mess of fast food and chain stores. Everything has changed.

I can not accept these surroundings as home because I largely reject suburban sensibilities, so I am left to wonder where my home is. Then I consider the settlers who arrived in this area in the nineteenth century. If this place was home, what did home mean to them? What is home when your neighbors have just been scalped by Comanche warriors? What is home when your crops won't grow? What is home when you can never get back to Arkansas or Missouri or Germany or Bohemia? These are the kinds of questions I address in my work, and I like the idea that a central theme has emerged to unify much of my writing for this period of my life.



Here is Texas native Don Williams playing Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Back Home," a song where music has become home for a condemned prisoner.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore in Denton

Last night we went to see Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin play at Dan's Silverleaf in Denton. Denton was the first stop on their tour, and the whole affair was very casual. Jimmie Dale talked about the old days in Austin and the time he played at a Leonard Cohen tribute for Cohen himself and accidentally botched a lyric, and a thousand other things, but he did not want to talk politics. So he played Woody Guthrie's "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" instead. That's all he needed to say. And his version of "Deportee" is the best I've ever heard.

Jimmie Dale can still sing with the angels, and Dave Alvin plays a fine guitar. It was a great time, and any show that ends with "Dallas," as in "Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?," is a good one in my books.

Here is a video of the Flatlanders playing one of my favorite songs of the night.

Fort Worth and Dallas Blues

This week I finished reading leadbelly by the poet Tyehimba Jess, which I bought at Deep Vellum books in Dallas. The fact that Leadbelly actually lived in the Commerce Street building now occupied by Deep Vellum made the purchase impossible to resist.

This collection is quite impressive, and Jess clearly has a virtuosic command of language. One of my favorite poems in the book, which is part of The National Poetry Series, was written through the eyes of Leadbelly's Stella guitar. Here is a stanza from "mistress stella speaks":

you think he is master of all
my twelve tongues, spreading notes
thick as a starless night, strangling spine
till my voice is a jungle of chords

And for your listening pleasure, here is Leadbelly playing "Fort Worth and Dallas Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCdg35Jp0eE