La Bloga

La Bloga

Chicana, Chicano, Latina, Latino, & more. Literature, Writers,

Children's Literature, News, Views & Reviews.

http://labloga.blogspot.com/

Much broader than Texana and oriented toward California but does contain notable Tejano literature connections.

Front Porch Journal - Literature from Texas State University

A literary journal is offered by Texas State University, Front Porch Journal, now in its 7th volume.

It's diverse

fiction + poetry + reviews + nonfiction + av + interviews + about us + submit + links

They are proud to announce Front Porch 7, featuring new poems by and video of John Gallaher and video of Mary Gaitskill.

Some Texana is mixed into the mix.

http://www.frontporchjournal.com/

Picturing a Different West - Janis Stout

Picturing a Different West:

Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin.

By Janis P. Stout. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. 352 pages. 7 b/w photos, 69 b/w images, notes, and bibliog. ISBN 089672610X $40.00 http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ Texas A & M University scholar, Janis Stout, offers students of alternative literary and art history the opportunity to find an absorbing exploration of Mary H. Austin and Willa Cather and by extension both women and the American experience.It’s a window to Western topography for understanding rather than its immediate use in the usual male stereotype of physical exploitation. Austin’s and Cather’s perception of the West was indirect by their seeing of printed illustrative matter and indirectly by their direct, first-hand sight.

Their mental processing, their own written narrative describing the environment, and their influences on illustrator selection, the actual illustrations, and page design all “informed a new literary tradition – that of an ungendered American West … not feminine so much as androgynous.”Here, Stout sees the West as a physical place rather than a geopolitical condition. She finds three important focal points:·

1) Austin and Cather’s personal experience of the West·

2) Art and illustration in the book-making experience·

3) Their revision of gender assumptions

For this volume Stout’s stimulation rose from her recognition of similarities of illustrations in Austin’s Land of Little Rain and Cather’s My Antonia. From there, she draws on many titles and dozens of authors.

Among the principals are the elders Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, and the newer hands Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers. Stout clarifies that women see and do things differently, although not all the time.

Brush Country.

By Lionel Garcia. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2004. ISBN 1-881515-62-1 paper $12.95 5 1/2x8. 88 pages. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/ Winner of the 2003 Texas Review Poetry Prize.

The widely acclaimed and successful writer, Lionel Garcia reflects on his rearing and heritage of his homeland, the brush country of Southwest Texas. Garcia’s poems begin with notices of the countryside – the dry, nearly barren land, with the cenizo and frijollo in bloom, a rabbit licking moisture from the leaves, and a red-tail hawk, a green jay, and a feeding deer. “The brush speaks to me / The voice is hard and strong, like the people.” The infrequent rain is almost mythological for the condemned. But there’s dancing on Saturday night at the ranch. The boys go off to war. His horse, Rocinante, dies and his grandfather works away from home. He struggles between sport and food with the killing of a deer. A dove, the wind, and a pelican lift him and leave him to be “I am the door at a Brush Country house.”

For a riding accident, the horse is killed to regain control of life forces, else what stability is there in life. A child dies, and the death is ascribed to God’s will, and the child is better dead than in this hard life, else what stability is there in life. A cowbell rings as if announcing the birds’ flight of fate. The priest reprimands the poor parishioners for risqué clothing, but even “God cannot change the fates of life.” Pacho intimates with Maria. The oilmen come, the hunter goes, and Garcia wonders about yesterday. A crazy woman cries for her children. A father denies his hunger.

Throughout a dry, persistent love lingers in the shadows. The cenizo and frijollo scent the air. Garcia concludes “How beautiful to live without / Remorse of what could have been.” Else, the reader may wonder what stability is there in life. Would you love the caliche upon which you were born?

George Garrett - Jeb Livingood

George Garrett:

Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life.

Edited by Jeb Livingood. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2002. 195 pp. Paper: $18.95. ISBN 1-881515-42-7 http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

George Garrett, retired from the University of Virginia, earned status as a Practicing Prince of Southern Letters, crowned by awards for novels, stories, poems, and essays, and has influenced American Letters now for decades. While not a Texan, his second book The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems was published in 1958 by the University of Texas Press, before his 30th birthday. He continued his Texas associations. These essays on his life and other writers range from Caedmon to Fitzgerald, Welty, Dickey, Chappell, Capote and their ilk, and on to modern academic cowboy and Indian shoot-outs over the role of college writing programs. Readers will find compassion and a sharp tongue. Texans may first pause on his short memorial of William Goyen, “Brother to Anyone with Ears to Hear.”

Garrett warmly acknowledges Goyen’s influence and personal graciousness. Prince Garrett describes that Goyen had “an honest and honorable East Texas face.” Katherine Ann Porter once responded to R.H.W. Dillard’s query “who was the best young American writer for me to read, the one writer whose work was of the highest quality and would teach me the most. She didn't even hesitate before giving her answer. ‘Read George Garrett,’ she said ….” (Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1999). Garrett mentions to young writers that earlier writers, long dead ones even, live in the present. Did he mean like winged creatures reaching for the sky or fools sitting atop flagpoles?

Cormac McCarthy's West - James Bell

Cormac McCarthy’s West: The Border Annotations.

By James Bell, Introduction by Patrick Shaw. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. xxii, 154 pages. Maps, illus. notes, bibliog.

If Larry McMurtry is the Gray Eminence of Texas Letters, Cormac McCarthy is the Red Eminence. As an established writer of Kentucky, he moved to El Paso, and his scenes shifted from wet cave lands to dry plains. The old saints Porter and Goyen might pause before the Gray and Red bookshelves, admiring McMurtry’s canon, movies, and lifestyle and maybe pausing pensively to reach for McCarthy’s trail of allusive density.

“Allusive density,” such is Patrick Shaw’s term to describe an element of the El Paso cardinal’s holy work. James Bell’s work is a spiffed up doctoral dissertation, compiling these allusions into simple systems with commentary to ease the reader into the text. It reminds this reader of the creative readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring trilogy – the maps, the directories, the countless accessories “needed” to understand or expand the great written image. If creative literature is judged by the amount and texture of its commentary, Bell shows the texture is palpable.

In a way it’s rather simple. For each of the trilogy titles (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), Bell indexes and annotates the chronological references and then does the same for the characters and then does the same for the place names. Following those 9 indexes, he provides two others, cultural allusions and historical allusions in the Trilogy. Flipping through the pages, the reviewer finds words that attract as labeled photos in a family scrapbook. With the garden hoed so well by Bell, others can now come and pick further fruits. But will it all lead to desolation on down The Road.

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist.

By Darlene Harbour Unrue. Illustrated. 381 pp. University Press of Mississippi. $30.

Paul Gray in the New York Times January 1 issue reviews this new biography of Texas’ greatest writer. (http://www.nytimes.com/)

Strong West Wind - Gail Caldwell

A Strong West Wind: A Memoir.

By Gail Caldwell. 228 pp. Random House. $24.95.

Readers may wish to read Joyce Johnson’s review from the April 2, Sunday New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/)

http://www.randomhouse.com/

Caldwell has been in the northeast for some decades now, along with her Pulitzer Prize for book reviews in the Boston Globe. Her own words are the most compelling invitation to read her volume on her life, especially her Texas home. She writes that "my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was. I missed the people and the land and the sky — my God I missed the sky — but most of all I missed the sense of placid mystery the place evoked, endemic there as heat is to thunder. You can be gone for years from Texas, I now believe, and still be felled by such memories.” Then there’s "Mine is a story that begins with the fragments of dreams on the most desolate of prairies, where a child came of age listening to the keening of dust storms drown out the strains of Protestant hymns."

Listen to this one, “The past has no compass. I know this now as surely as I know that the land itself has a voice, capable of keening. Anyone who finds this a pathetic fallacy has never lain on a rock in high wind. It's hard listening, God in the vortex and all that, because the answers there usually have nothing to do with the questions posed. You have to walk out into it to learn anything."

Further on, while unloading her father’s shotgun for his protection she "realized how I must look — a barefoot woman in the yard with a rifle in her arms — and I remembered where I was and thought, Oh hell, it's Texas, no one would even care." Place this one on the shelf for literature.