"But Archer City never became the literary destination that he’d hoped, and his store, Booked Up, struggled financially...."

"McMurtry had followed the family tradition after all, lashing himself to a dying industry and getting his heart broken in the process. After his death, the Texas legislature passed a resolution honoring his memory; two years later, a state representative said that schools 'might need to ban 'Lonesome Dove"' for being too sexually explicit."

Writes Rachel Monroe, in "How Larry McMurtry Defined and Undermined the Idea of Texas/The 'Lonesome Dove' author’s great subject was the mismatch between the glamorized West and the grimmer reality." (The New Yorker).

"I later went down a Larry McMurtry rabbit hole, and barely escaped, after reading 'Lonesome Dove'...."

That's the most interesting line in Hugh Hewitt's account of his life history of reading, misleadingly titled "What I’m reading this summer" (WaPo). 

The years lost to Larry McMurtry seem to have been when Hewitt, who is 66, was in his 30s. He offers no explanation for why McMurtry books were a rabbit hole and does not examine what life would have been like if he hadn't escaped from it. 

I was only distracted by that because I'm in the middle of reading 2 Larry McMurtry books — "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" and "The Last Picture Show" — and I'd never even considered reading McMurtry until this year. 

Did I fall into a rabbit hole? I've been reading the first book, WBATDQROSAB, for months and can't remember why I started, and I've been reading TLPS because I happened to finally, after all these years, watched the movie, and I had a few questions — Did Ruth have an abortion? — and I wanted to find the answers — No, she had a mild case of breast cancer.

"Since my bypass surgery I’ve been haunted by the presence of a terrible knowledge that is just out of reach..."

"... my brain can’t access this pain but my nerves, bone, muscle, tissue keep the fact of it with them, I feel.... I had been... reading three newspapers a day, reading many magazines, and in general, trying to stay informed. But more or less overnight, staying informed ceased to matter to me. Though I subscribed to the New York Times in three cities I put it aside one day and didn’t read another issue for seven months. From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person—and then even the outline began to fade, erased by what had happened inside. I felt as if I was vanishing—or more accurately, had vanished.... The thing, more than any other, that convinced me I had in some sense died was that I couldn’t read. I went to my bookshops but could not connect with the books.... I had read every day of my life... It was the stablest of all pleasures, and now it was gone. The fact was that even then I could read professionally.... But read for pleasure, no. I had floated down the Nile and out to sea.... The problem, I eventually realized, was that reading is a form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do—the protest from inside was too powerful. My inability to externalize seemed to be organ based, as if the organs to which violence had been done were protesting so much that I couldn’t attend to anything else."

From "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" by Larry McMurtry (published in 2001).

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless.”

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film..."

"... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fishermen that if they found out anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichthyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the questions of what needs to be done and what is superfluous."

Said Ezra Pound in an interview with The Paris Review in 1962.

I found that as a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond," pp. 30-31:

"It's kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer."

"It" = a Hermes 3000 typewriter, "surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius."

The quote is from Larry McMurtry, on the occasion of winning the Golden Globe award for the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." I'm reading that, from 2006, because I just got around, after all these years to making a Larry McMurtry tag for this blog. I dislike tag proliferation, and I avoid making a tag for individuals unless I think they'll be used a few times. It turned out there were 4 old posts with Larry McMurtry's name in them.

The other 3 are:

1. Larry McMurtry effusing over Diane Keaton: "She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

2. Larry McMurtry answering questions from a NYT interviewer, including ""What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?" Answer:

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

3. Here's the good, timelessly timely one: "Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book." Clinton is Bill Clinton, and the book is "My Life." Let's go back and read what McMurtry banged out on his juicy Hermes 3000 back in 2004:

Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for bedroom sports, but not much time. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may be three of the nicest ladies in America, but their "conquest," however we are to understand that term, does not make Clinton the world's No. 1 ladies' man, or even the No. 1 ladies' man of northwest Washington....

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president....

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved.

"She asked me several times to read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, not quite to the point of persistence..."

"... not nagging or begging, but with a quiet unspoken pleading—she loved it, and she wanted to talk about it with someone she knew would love it too; I had read The Last Picture Show, and I knew I would like the writing enough to ride along with the plot (I understood it was not a Louis L’Amour type of Western), but I didn’t, and I’m not sure why; maybe it was just the resistance that even an adult child feels when a parent asks her to do something optional—I could feel her yearning, and maybe that scared or dismayed me in ways I still can’t name, or maybe I thought I had too many other 'important' things I wanted to read, this being the years I was in grad school and had developed a bookaholic habit of acquiring them faster than I could ever read them, a habit that is yet uncured, which is sometimes serendipitous, because on one of the four bookshelves in my bedroom, here is her swaybacked copy, which I still haven’t read, but which I’ve already possessed by writing my name in, and when I finally start reading the first page—such a simple, easy thing to do, no resistance at all—oh God, forgive me, I’m hooked by the first sentence and smitten by a half-sentence in the middle of the second paragraph, 'Pigs on the porch just made things hotter,' and by the second chapter I understand she probably wanted to talk about the affection the writer bore for these characters, and his attention to their interior lives, which is probably the same reason she begged me to read some Barbara Pym, and now that I’ve passed 50 myself, maybe by reading this book I can put away the security blanket of regrets and wallow no more in the same pond that made child-me ask for a song I knew would make me cry."

That's the longest sentence in "50 Things About My Mother," in which each of the 50 things is one sentence long. Many of the sentence are short. It's easy to write short sentences, a little harder to mix short and long sentences, and quite hard — not that it's often a good idea — to write an extremely long sentence like that. When you do write an extremely long sentence, you should have a good reason, and I'll bet you could write 50 reasons, in long and short sentences, why that long sentence is that long.

Anyway, tomorrow is Mother's Day. I hope you — unlike me and the author of that list, Laura Lynn Brown — have a mother who is still alive. 

"She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

"Someday? I was reminded of those credit cards which come preapproved. I was pretty sure that Diane Keaton was preapproved for complicated, and still is. On a too-brief visit last weekend I had, for a glimmering moment, a sense that I was about to grasp what she was up to. But when she left, she took the glimmer with her, leaving me no closer to comprehending her agenda than I have been for the past twenty-eight years."

Larry McMurtry effuses over his friend Diane Keaton... and her book "Clown Paintings":

There's nothing the fondest friend can do about the pain of clowns—pain, after all, is where their job starts. In working up to the book called Clown Paintings—it's filled with paintings of clowns—Diane called various of her friends who work in comedy to get their thoughts on clowns—and what she got was their permission to shove off. Woody Allen and Steve Martin and the others she lists "work in comedy," and comedy arises from pain, not from happiness. Perhaps the pain of clowns is a little more primal, which is one good reason for people who work in comedy to give clowns a pass.

Clown Paintings—it's filled with paintings of clowns....

Simulblogging the Golden Globes.

Are you watching the Golden Globes? On this last day of winter break, this Martin Luther King Day holiday, I whiled away much of my time in can't-put-it-down mode watching the DVDs of Season 1 of "Project Runway," which recently came in the mail. I watched it effortlessly, in marathon form. Oh, how I loved it! I laughed. I cried. I loved Austin Scarlett from the first moment, and I loved a lot of other people over the course of the high-speed (for me) season. As Kara Saun emerged as a force, I cried at her greatness. But I won't do any spoilers here. If you didn't watch the show, order the DVD. Now, I can move comfortably back into Season 2, already in progress. But do I have the TV energy to sit through the crazy Globes? Well, yes, why not?

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney, for "Syriana." He thanks Jack Abramoff. "Who would name their kid 'Jack' with the last word's 'off' at the end of you last name? No wonder that guy's screwed up."

Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz for "Constant Gardener." Her dress isn't not as good as what Austin Scarlett could have made. Her speech is the usual boring thanks. No smutty political talk a la Clooney.

TV supporting actor: Paul Newman for "Empire Falls." He's not there.

TV supporting actress: Sandra Oh. She's irritatingly overexcited saying "I-I-I-I-I-I feel like someone's set me on fire."

Drew Barrymore comes out in horrendous green with shockingly pendulous breasts to introduce the first of the best picture nominees "Good Night and Good Luck."

TV actress: Geena Davis wins for playing the President of the United States. She's chubby and wearing a dress that would have been devastated by the "Project Runway" judges. She's funny, taking people by in telling a story of a little girl who told her she wanted to be President then admitting it was a fake. And there's no add-on joke that lying is a way of being President-like.

TV actor: Hugh Laurie, for "House." Blabby! Thinks he's cute.

Clip from "The Producers" introduced by baby-talking hag Melanie Griffith. The film is an embarrassment.

"Empire Falls" wins for whatever the category is for that.

Best Actor, TV: Steve Carell, for "The Office," beating that "Earl" guy and Larry David. He acts out reading from a piece of paper, a speech written by his wife. A line from it: "To my parents, for not making me go to law school."

Best Actress, movie musical or comedy: Reese Witherspoon for "Walk the Line." "Okay, my husband just hit me so hard, I almost fell over."

Actress, TV comedy: Mary-Louise Parker for "Weeds." She giggles a lot in a weed-appropriate way. "I just want to make out with all of you."

Actor, TV movie: Jonathan Rhys Meyers for impersonating Elvis.

Actress, TV movie: S. Epatha Merkerson. "I'm 53 years old. This was my first lead in a film."

Screenplay: "Brokeback Mountain." Larry McMurtry thanks his lawyers and his Hermes 3000 typewriter. "It's kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer."

TV musical/comedy: "Desperate Housewives."

John Williams wins for one of his drecky soundtracks. Then some crappy song from "Brokeback Mountain" wins.

Ooh! Gwyneth Paltrow comes out in a neat white dress with puff sleeves. A special award for Anthony Hopkins. We see him playing a number of roles, including Hitler (yelling) and Nixon (sobbing). And the usual fava-beans-and-a-nice-chianti stuff. [ADDED: Chris emails: Worst-ever misquoting of a famous movie line: "Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille" (Anthony Hopkins).]

Best director: Ang Lee for "Brokeback Mountain." "Wow, getting this award, for this movie, from The Man." (The Man is Clint Eastwood.) "And everyone in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China: I wish you a Happy New Year."

Best actor, movie musical or comedy: Presented by John Travolta. Joaquin Phoenix for "Walk the Line." I don't like the way the actors in dramatic musical movies always beat the comic actors in this category. It's against the spirit of the categorization.

Best picture, musical or comedy: "Walk the Line." Again, unfair to comedies. A violation of the spirit of the categorization. "I know that John and June are up in Heaven with my mom and dad," says the producer, inanely. Why would Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash hang out with some producer's parents? That's just nutty.

Best TV drama: "Lost." "The show is an exercise in faith, and most of all we would like to thank you for having faith in us." Suddenly, the awardcast has gone all religious.

Dennis Quaid introduces clips for "Brokeback Mountain," calling it "controversial" and saying it "rhymes with 'chick flick.'" Ew! Yikes. Classy.

Best actress, drama: Felicity Huffman, who cries and salutes transgender persons for "becoming who they really are."

Best actor, drama: Phillip Seymour Hoffman for "Capote." "I was given the best part of my life."

Best picture, drama: Morgan Freeman announces the nominee. I hear his voice and look for the penguins. [ADDED: Sorry, it was Denzel Washington. I was in another room, listening, at this point.] "Brokeback Mountain" wins. Producers accept and are, as always boring. No info on what his parents are doing in the afterworld.

And the show ends precisely on time. Nothing surprising or weird this year, despite the conventional wisdom that people get drunk and let loose at the Globes. I wouldn't count the implied smuttiness of the Clooney and Quaid remarks. Just your basic handing out of awards to pretty much everyone you thought would get one.

UPDATE: The Anchoress followed the Globes and has lots of catty things to say about fashion -- and emaciation.

"What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?"

I liked the very cranky interview Larry McMurtry gave to the NYT Magazine's Deborah Solomon, who asked that question. He answers:

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Solomon: Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

McMurtry: No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

I've never read a Larry McMurtry book. I've never even watched the DVD of "The Last Picture Show" that I bought years ago, after long before that missing the movie when it played in theaters. But he seems like an awfully funny guy.

Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book.

Here's a typical passage (appearing in this Sunday's NYT Book Review):

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president. Clinton's now up there with Madonna, in the highlands that are even above talent. In fact, he and Madonna may, just at the moment, be the only ones way up there, problems having arisen with so many lesser reputations.

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

What??