Bill Moyers on Texas Observer

Recollections of 50 years on the Texas Observer by Bill Moyers back in 2005

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/the-texas-observer-_b_10990.html

Bill Moyers' other Huffington Post postings

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/#blogger_bio

It's a little odd to accidentally find this 2005 posting today when Scott McLlellan's new book about his time as George Bush's aide and press secretary (same role as Moyers with LBJ) is immediately in the news. "The View" seemed to enjoy slapping Scott around despite his disturbingly honest assessment of the Bush administration's selling of the Iraqi war. One of the View's potshots dealt with loyalty. It was obvious one of the women was reading from somebody else's tipsheet. As for loyalty, Scott may be an independent sort of fella quite in line with his mother. Carole Keeton (maiden name from father at UT Law School etc) made her way up in Texas politics beginning with the Austin ISD, then Austin mayor, and subsequently to Texas Comptroller from which she, who had become a nominal Republican a few years earlier, ran as an independent for governor against reigning Rick Perry who ultimately won (alsos against independent Kinky Friedman and Democrat Chris Bell) but only by a small plurality. May want to watch Scott.

Don Graham Observes Texas Literature

Don Graham, lead academician in Texas letters down at the University on the Colorado River, offers his corrective commentary, "Deathless Prose," in a recent Texas Observer, February 8, 2008 issue

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2687

It's a good read. He ambles through John Graves, Elmer Kelton, Larry McMurtry, Dagoberto Gilb, glances at genderist writing and the rise of PETA values, connects with Betty Sue Flowers. Not to leave a sacred cow unshorn, along the way, he does mention UT's classless tuition and Texas Monthly's persistance in carrying some content between the advertisements. He rounds it out with mentions of international concerns of the French and Chinese.

Observer Observes McMurtry's Unnatural Observation on Place

The Texas Observer's role in disturbing the burial place of Texas literature is paid a light revivival within its "A Novelist in Full" by Azita Osamloo.

While pawing through the remains of a separate dilemma, Osamloo states,
"The dilemma calls to mind the 1981 Observer essay in which Larry McMurtry took his fellow Texas writers to task for “paying too much attention to nature, not enough to human nature.” "

Yes, that would partially account for McMurtry's differing sensibilities, his separation from nature, and his documentation of Texans' collective separation.

Now that our separation from nature is acknowledged by climate change, one wonders when our novelists will document our going back home again, back to the plains, the ponds, the forests, the highlands, and the marshlands.

Somewhere I seem to remember that I read an account of Edward Abbey, an, ahem, activitst environmentalist and writer, and that account included a portion of his childhood maybe in or around San Antonio in the custody of his mother and her some sort of emotionally intense religious committment. Could that intensive religiosity have transferred into his own firebrand label? If that were plausible, could we lay some claim to him as a Texas writer - that is, if his time here and some of his influences are significantly derived from here?

Such a connection, if we successful transit to it, may offer a basis for other surreal or otherwise odd literary passersby.

It's unfashionable to claim Conan the Barbarian as a Texan, despite the author's clear Texan citizenship and the outlandish bragadaccio of Conan being suggestive of the often larger-than-life Texan profile (even in something so simple as that Lions movie with the two brothers on their old Texas farm).

And there's Anne Rice and her previous vampirial narratives. She met and matured and married with a young Texan who went on to be a significant surrealist poet. She and he were close kins in their literature. Is vampirism so distant from surreal poetry? Her husband's Texas roots sucked up something to push him onward when "feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace" (terribly misquoting Browning). But could Anne have sunk her teeth properly without her Texas influence?

While Conan and vampires are beyond the realm of real nature, they are still bound to it by their very primitive and visceral existences - hence still deferring to nature.

Even Cormac McCarthy's work begins and lives deep within natural impulses and terrains - The Road being one of the ultimate places, merging the internal novel with the external.