Postscripts

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Looking for Texas

"Readers of Howard's End will recall that Margaret Schlagel, at the age of twenty-nine, longed to see life steadily and see it whole," Larry McMurtry writes in one of his essays, "A Look at the Lost Frontier" that can be found in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. "When I was twenty-nine I had the same ambition in regard to Texas," he declares. So did photographer Rick Vanderpool, though it's taken him a bit longer than it did McMurtry (Vanderpool is 51). Vanderpool's new book, Looking for Texas: Essays From the Coffee Ring Journal (Republic of Texas Press, 265 pp., $24.95 paper), is an odd little assemblage of photos of the word "Texas," but not just any "Texas." McMurtry may have wanted to hit the road in order to "store up a few new perceptions" of the state but Vanderpool apparently wants to catalog a few old ones. His "Texas" is quite literal; he traveled to all 254 county seats in the state and found an image of the word "Texas" in each county seat and took a picture of it. So "Texas" is on old, crumbling signs fronting dilapidated stores but also brand-new ones on revitalized Main Streets, and everywhere in-between, it seems. Vanderpool, who lives in Commerce, will be at Barnes & Noble in Round Rock (in the La Frontera shopping center at the intersection of I-35 and FM 1325) on Saturday, Jan. 6, at 2pm.

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Upcoming

Popular children's author Jack Gantos will be at BookPeople on Thursday, Jan. 11, at 7pm, to read from his latest book, Joey Pigza Loses Control, in which our disaster-prone hero, who in his last outing survived swallowing a key, overcomes his attention deficit disorder. Now that he's settled down, Joey wants to get reacquainted with his estranged father ... who has ADD... Austin author James Hynes (Publish and Perish, The Wild Colonial Boy) is out with another delightfully vicious satire of university life, The Lecturer's Tale. This is not your typical campus novel, though. On page one, protagonist Nelson Humboldt, who needs to get himself on the tenure track in the English department at fictional Midwest University, has his right index finger neatly removed by the whirring spokes of a student's bicycle. "In a discipline where scholarly heft was defined by being more postcolonial than thou," Nelson's finger makes a quite unforgettable return in this fantastical tale as staid Nelson finds himself a little confused by all of his wildly non-canonical colleagues. In Hynes' slightly skewed universe, Nelson is a freshman composition teacher who is teaching from a text that advocates such things as having students summarize great works of literature as bumper stickers (The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't It Pretty to Think So?") and sometimes takes a therapeutic approach to pedagogy: "Is Rip Van Winkle a victim of a sleep disorder? Discuss. Role-play psychiatrists and treat Captain Ahab for monomania." The satire is fiendishly wicked and funny, and the plot engrossing. In short, Nelson, a "mild-mannered liberal pluralist," is given a chance to rid the English department of semioticans, postmodernists, and postcolonialists, though almost all the profs in this story, postmodern or not, are guilty of vile infighting as they vie with one another for esteem and a shot at becoming the department chair. Hynes' book tour begins at the end of this month, and he'll be back in town to give a reading near the end of February.