Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

One of the many books I requested from my public library based on the late Larry McMurtry’s recommendation was Wallace Stegner’s memoir, Wolf Willow, which McMurtry called “a wonderful book.”  (He was right.)

Stegner was born in 1909.  He spent much of his childhood in a tiny and isolated farming town in Saskatchewan called Eastend.  

McMurtry grew up several decades later in Archer City, an equally obscure plains town in the Texas Panhandle that is 1500 miles from Eastend as the crow flies but probably wasn’t all that different culturally.  I’m sure Wolf Willow spoke to him in a very personal sense.  

From Wolf Willow:

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.  I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars . . . the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kind of shame I feel when I do . . . have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely lonely exposed prairie of the homestead.

I grew up in a very different environment – the small city in Missouri where I spent my childhood in the fifties and sixties was very far removed from the isolated frontier village where Stegner lived a hundred years ago – but like Stegner, I know where I am from.

*     *     *     *     *

More from Wolf Willow: 

Once I was comparing my background with that of an English novelist friend.  Where he had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent for every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries, and British Museums, made familiar from infancy with the conversation of the eloquent and the great, I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, with architecture, almost without music and theatre, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums bookstores, almost without books.  

My hometown wasn’t a “dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere.”  Unlike Eastend, it had a good public library that I took full advantage of, and there were a number of music teachers who taught piano and violin and other instruments – almost all of my childhood friends learned to play a musical instrument.  We also had movies and radio and television, which exposed us to the wider world.

Wallace Stegner

But while Joplin wasn’t as far culturally from New York City and Chicago as the prairie town where Stegner grew up, we still had a cultural inferiority complex.  Joplin had an airport serviced by commercial airlines and was situated on a major interstate highway, but I never flew anywhere until I was almost 18, and my family rarely used that highway to travel anywhere more than an hour or two away.

I read constantly.  But reading about England or France or Italy isn’t the same thing as being there.  And reading a Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw play isn’t the same as seeing that play performed.

There are still dozens – perhaps hundreds – of place names and other proper nouns that I can spell and define, but am reluctant to speak in public out of fear that I will mispronounce them, which would reveal to my more sophisticated friends and associates that I’m a redneck hick.  (You don’t learn how to pronounce French aphorisms or the names of Tolstoy characters by reading books.)

*     *     *     *     *

Despite his very humble beginnings, Wallace Stegner eventually got a Ph.D., and taught at Harvard and Stanford.  He wrote a dozen-odd novels, a dozen-odd nonfiction books, and several collections of essays and short stories, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a National Book Award, and many other honors.

I’m guessing he was always of two minds about people like that English novelist friend.  On the one hand, he was probably somewhat intimidated by their sophistication and politesse.  But on the other hand, I’m sure he was fiercely proud and would have been happy to invite anyone who condescended to him to step outside.

*     *     *    *     *

“Boondocks” was a 2005 hit for the very successful country music group, Little Big Town.

Little Big Town

It’s a great song, but I wish an edgier artist than Little Big Town had recorded it.  Nothing against them, but I think the song would from benefit if it was performed by someone who sounded like he had a big chip on his shoulder – someone who would happily take a swing at you if you gave him an excuse.  That would take the record to a whole ’nother level.

Click here to see the official music video for “Boondocks.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Sløtface – "New Year, New Me" (2020)

I keep holding

Books I’ll never read

As you can see from the screenshot below, I currently have 44 items checked out from my public library – ranging in length from the 126 large-fonted and generously-spaced pages  of Susan Sontag’s book about war, Regarding the Pain of Others, to the mind-boggling 1402 fine-print pages of an unabridged edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Those numbers somewhat overstate the quantity of reading material that I’m hoarding.  For example, I’ve checked out several children’s books to read to my grandkids when they visit, plus I have a few DVDs of movies that aren’t currently available on Netflix.  

Also, there’s some duplication among my checkouts.  When I’m trying to get my hands on a new book, I will usually put a hold on its Kindle version and large-print edition as well as reserving the regular print edition of the book.  On occasion two or all three versions of the same book become available at the same time. 

So my 44 checked-out items represent about three dozen different adult titles.

*     *     *     *     *

Is there any chance that I will actually read all three dozen of these books?

Of course not.  I freely admit that even though it is now possible to hold on to them almost indefinitely.

The nominal time you are allowed to hold on a printed library book in my county is three weeks, but it is possible to renew a checkout up to ten times.  And our library has stopped levying late fines since covid-19 reared its ugly head – so there’s no real force behind return dates. 

By the way, e-books are supposed to disappear automatically from my Kindle on the due date.  But I’ve learned that I can hold on to a Kindle book indefinitely if I put it into “airplane” mode after downloading the book – scheduled deletions take place via the internet, and they can’t happen if you never connect your device to the internet.  (Which is why the screenshot above indicates that I have zero checkouts on my Kindle – the library thinks all those books have been returned, but I outsmarted them!)

*     *     *     *     *

Given that I almost certainly will not read that 1402-page unabridged Life of Johnson, why did I check it out?  Not to mention four Wallace Stegner novels (plus some works of nonfiction by that author), and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, and Susan Sontag’s essays, and Louis Menand’s weighty The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America?  (Just typing the title of that last book makes me want to take a nap.)

There’s something abnormal about my behavior.  Having so many library books at once is clearly a form of hoarding, and must be the result of some deep-seated psychological need.

I suspect it has something to do with my growing up in an environment of scarcity.  My family was not poor by any means – I never missed a meal, or was without suitable clothing and shoes – but my grew-up-in-the-Depression parents were extremely frugal, and were reluctant to spend money on anything other than the necessities of life . . . which certainly didn’t include books.

*     *     *     *     *

The late Larry McMurtry wrote several dozen books (including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove) during his lifetime but enjoyed reading more than writing.  He became a very successful used and rare book dealer – at one time his inventory consisted of some 400,000 volumes.  More importantly for my purposes, he had a personal collection of 20,000 books in his home.

Larry McMurtry

When McMurtry was in his seventies, he wrote three short autobiographical books – Books (about his career as a rare book dealer), Literary Life (about his career as a prolific novelist and nonfiction author), and Hollywood (about the many film adaptations of his books and the many screenplays he wrote).  

In the course of his life, McMurtry read an astonishing number of books, and he mentions quite a few of them in his memoirs.  Most of the dozens of library books sitting in my home or residing digitally on my Kindle are books that McMurtry endorsed – not only the writings of Stegner, Sontag, and Waugh mentioned above but also the novels and short stories of John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon (all of whom I was infatuated with when I was an English major at Rice).

*     *     *     *     *

McMurtry grew up in a tiny Texas town, miles away from the nearest bookstore, but he never bothered getting a library card:

I didn’t want books I had to bring back.  I wanted books to keep, books that I could consider . . . before I read them.  My approach to books was slow – I might seize them quickly but wait awhile to read them.  War and Peace, for example . . . . I kept it around, looked at it, puzzled over the names, dipped in here and there, a process that went on for perhaps a year before I sat down and read the book.

From the first I was attracted to the look and feel of books – I liked to enter . . . the aura of reading, which involved mental preparation and was a way, I guess, of savoring the experience ahead.  This time of anticipation is one of the pleasures of having a personal library.

I understand how McMurtry felt.  For example, I bought the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell years ago.  I love Orwell, and I love seeing those four volumes on my bookshelf – even though I’ve never torn open the cellophane wrapper that set of books came in, much less read them:

But I became a denizen of my local public library at a very young age.  My hometown didn’t have a real bookstore, so I got in the habit of getting books from the library rather than buying them.  

That habit has persisted until today.  I’ve bought a lot of records in my day – libraries never had much in the way of rock albums – but own relatively few books.  When a book is easily available from the public library, why buy it?

*     *     *     *     *

I’ve written a lot about Larry McMurtry since his death in March, and I’m probably not done with him yet.

McMurtry went to the same college I attended – Rice University in Houston – and he taught creative writing at Rice my freshman year.  I was very aware of McMurtry because the movie adaptation of his book, The Last Picture Show, was released to widespread acclaim when I was at Rice.  

But I never met McMurtry.  While I took creative writing as a senior, I was more occupied with basic classes my freshman year.  And it would never have occurred to me to drop by his office for a chat.

By the time I graduated from law school and moved to Washington, DC, McMurtry had opened a used and rare bookstore called “Booked Up” there.  I passed by his bookstore a number of times, but never went in and struck up a conversation with him.  That would have seemed like bad form to me – akin to seeing a famous athlete or musician at a restaurant and interrupting his dinner to ask him to pose for a selfie with me.

Now that McMurtry’s dead, I have to let go of the fantasy I had about meeting him some day, talking to him about books and movies, and learning that we shared so many opinions that we became friends.  

I have a lot of other fantasies.  Most of them involve women who aren’t dead, but might as well be for purposes of those fantasies.

*     *     *     *     *

Sløtface is a Norwegian band that formed in 2012.  According to Billboard, their music has “won praise from the blogosphere and tastemaker music press for their brash mix of nagging pop hooks and garage punk aesthetic.” 

Sløtface used to call itself Slutface but changed their name in hopes of avoiding what they have called “social media censorship.”

Sløtface

“We have in no way changed our political and feminist message,” the group said when they adopted the new moniker in 2016.  “We just hope to reach more people with our lyrics and message by changing one silly letter of our name and thereby avoiding censorship.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that I couldn’t pass up a song that had lyrics that were so perfectly suited for this post.  

Click here to listen to “New Year, New Me,” which was released on the band’s 2020 album, Sorry for the Late Reply.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

I got there in the nick of time

Before he got his hands across your state line

One of the characters in the novel I’m currently reading (Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety) is “trying to get through Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.” 

Men of Good Will – its title is Les Hommes de bonne volonté in the original French – consists of no fewer than 27 individual volumes totaling 7892.  It’s what the French call a roman-fleuve, or “river novel.”  

I don’t know if it’s more accurate to describe it as 27 related novels with overlapping plots and recurring characters, or as one humongous novel published in 27 parts.  

Volume 27 of Men of Good Will

But I do know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever read it.

*     *     *     *     *

A roman-flueve that I do hope to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or À la recherche du temps perdu).

Proust’s masterpiece is a mere seven volumes and 3031 pages – child’s play compared to Men of Good Will.

Given my advanced age, I probably should get started on In Search of Lost Time sooner rather than later.  After all, it took me about seven weeks to get through David Foster Wallace’s1104-page monstrosity, Infinite Jest, earlier this year.

It took me a lot less time to get through the late Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and its four sequels – one of several “river novels” that the prolific McMurtry wrote before dying in March of this year.  Infinite Jest is slow going compared to McMurtry’s books, and I have a feeling Proust is going to be even harder to digest than Wallace was.

*     *     *     *     *

 In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, Larry McMurtry writes that the books he chose to read while recovering from a 1991 heart attack and the quadruple-bypass surgery he underwent shortly thereafter were In Search of Lost Time and the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  

But shortly after finishing those books, he underwent a radical personality transformation:

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 . . . . I became, to myself, more and more like a ghost, or a shadow. . . . [T]he self that I had once been had lost its life. . . .

I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where my old self had gone. . . . I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for 55 years was simply no longer there.

Larry McMurtry at age 77

The most unsettling aspect of this loss of personality was that McMurtry became incapable of reading for pleasure.  Reading had been “the stablest of all pleasures” for McMurtry – he had read every day of his life since he was a boy. 

In the third year after his surgery, McMurtry slowly began to enjoy reading again – and he read many books in the two-plus decades he lived after that.  But the Proust and Woolf works remained McMurtry’s favorites.

I love Larry McMurtry’s writing, and have great respect for his judgment when it comes to other authors.  His high opinion of In Search of Lost Time is reason enough for me to get serious about diving into it.  

But despite his praise of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I’m not so sure I’ll be reading them.  I’ve tried to read Woolf in the past, and it didn’t turn out well.  (Once bitten, twice shy.)

*     *     *     *     *

“Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was written by ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter, and released in 1975 on his eponymous debut album.

I’m featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of the song because the music video for the Great White version is simply too fabulous for words.  For one thing, it has mass quantities of oh-so-1989 bleached-blonde hair that’s teased to within an inch of its life – and I’m just talking about the guys in the band.

No hair band ever deserved the moniker more than Great White:

Click here to read my original post featuring this record, which was published on April 12, 2015.  It’s a very impressive effort, if I do say so myself.

Click here to watch the “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” video.

And click below to buy the record from Amazon.  (Come on . . . you know you want it!)

Curtis McMurtry – "Loves Me More" (2017)

You knew I was a snake

So of course I’m gonna bite you

The late novelist Larry McMurtry once wrote that he can’t remember either of his parents ever reading him a story.  He assumes his parents owned a Bible, but remembers his boyhood home as being otherwise “totally bookless.”

Larry McMurtry, author and bookman

Despite that, he became a man for whom books meant almost everything.  (“Despite that” may be the wrong phrase – perhaps I should have said, “Because of that, he became a man for whom books meant almost everything.”)

*     *     *     *     *

McMurtry’s family moved from an isolated into the small town of Archer City when he was in second grade.  Archer City didn’t have a public library, but the high school had a small library where McMurtry spent a lot of his time.  

His senior year, McMurtry began to steal books – mostly English classics – from that library.  The librarian knew what was going on but never reprimanded him – she simply went to his house when he was away on his senior trip and retrieved the purloined volumes.

Years later, McMurtry bought his boyhood house, had floor-to-ceiling bookcases built in every room, and filled those bookcases with some 25,000 of his own books:

*     *     *     *     *

Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams may have been the best pure hitter ever to swing a bat.  But there were some – including more than one professional fishing guide – who believed that Williams was a better fisherman than he was a hitter.

McMurtry was a great writer.  He wrote 32 novels – several were best-sellers, and one (Lonesome Dove) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – and a dozen or so nonfiction books.  But he may have been as accomplished a bookman as he was an author.

“Bookman” is the word McMurtry uses to describe himself in his 2008 memoir, Books.  It means a person who makes a living buying and selling books – in particular, old and rare books.

*     *     *     *     *

McMurtry dabbled in book scouting and dealing while teaching English at Rice University in Houston.  In 1969 – when he was 33 – he gave up teaching and moved to Washington, DC, where he and a partner opened an antiquarian bookstore he named Booked Up.  He eventually accumulated a stock of 75,000 volumes. 

Eventually rents in the tony Georgetown area rose to a level that made it impractical for McMurtry to maintain his store there.  So he started buying vacant buildings in Archer City, Texas, where he had been born in 1936.  (Archer City – a small Texas Panhandle town that is now home to roughly 1700 souls – was where The Last Picture Show was filmed.)

At one point, those buildings contained some 450,000 books.  He auctioned off most of them in 2012 – he was 76 years old, and had no heir waiting in the wings who wanted to take over the business.

The 2012 auction at Booked Up

The Booked Up website says that the store currently has between 150,000 and 200,000 books for sale. 

I’m not sure what will happen to those books now that Larry McMurtry is no longer alive – I’m hoping that he made arrangements for the store to stay open.

*     *     *     *     *

Of course, McMurtry sold many of the rare secondhand books that he hunted down and purchased.  But being a bookman was never about making money for him.  “For the first twenty years of my career as a book hunter, I actually read almost all the books I had gone to such trouble to find,” he wrote in Books.  “Getting the books I wanted to read was the main reason for the pursuit.” 

When he was still a college student, McMurtry was drawn to bibliographies.  He eventually assembled a reference library of several thousand books about books.  

As Books makes clear, McMurtry was a remarkably well-read individual.  But his love of books transcended the contents of those books.  “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books,” he wrote, “not merely of the information in them.”  

*     *     *     *     *

I was surprised to read that McMurtry – one of the best and most prolific writers of fiction in the last 50 years – stopped reading fiction several decades ago.  

“For the twenty years or so in which I reviewed [books] for newspapers regularly, I mainly reviewed fiction . . . I suspect I reviewed several hundred novels,” he explained in Books, “and the result was that I burned out as a reader of fiction.”  

McMurtry says that the last novel he reviewed was Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist – which was published in 1985.  Later, one of his editors would send him carefully selected works of new fiction.  “But I knew I couldn’t read them, and sent them back,” he wrote.

*     *     *     *     *

Journalist Maureen Orth, who is the widow of the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, met McMurtry while browsing at Booked Up half a century ago, and the two became close friends – so close that McMurtry dedicated Lonesome Dove to her. 

Larry McMurtry and Maureen Orth

Here’s what Orth wrote about McMurtry shortly after his death:

Larry McMurtry loved, respected, and appreciated women more than any man I ever knew. . . .

Larry was supremely generous and stubbornly patient. Through the years there became a small circle of us – women Larry cultivated and cared for, but didn’t necessarily sleep with.  He was willing to wait, he said, for years to see if anything might spark, and meanwhile he would keep writing us letters, buying us dinners or antique necklaces, sending flowers to our mothers, and just generally being a prince while we got our hearts chewed up by less worthy boys.  

“If I thought a love affair would give me six months of intense pleasure but that this woman I had a real affinity for would not be in my life ten years from now,” he once told me, “I would walk around the love affair if there was one to be walked around.  I would go for the long-term friendship.”

*     *     *     *     *

That doesn’t mean that McMurtry wouldn’t have regretted missing out on that love affair.  But he was a realist.  

From Books:

Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women which was that there are just too many nice ones.  One simply can’t fall in love with, sleep with, or marry all the nice women.  One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who for whatever accident of timing or attraction simply slips by and recedes to return only in dreams.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s what NPR’s Scott Simon said about the singer/songwriter responsible for today’s featured song:

His grandfather is author Larry McMurtry, his father is songwriter James McMurtry.  So it’s no surprise Curtis McMurtry’s songs are full of vivid characters.

“Loves Me More” was released in 2017 on his second studio album, The Hornet’s Nest:

Click here to listen to “Loves Me More.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

James McMurtry – "Choctaw Bingo" (2002)

You know he had to leave Texas

But he won’t say why

“To the extent that I’m known to the general public at all,” the late Larry McMurtry wrote in 2008, “I’m known as a novelist whose books make excellent movies – Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove.”

McMurtry wrote 32 novels – several were bestsellers, and one won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  But during the years he lived in Washington, DC, the frequency with which he was invited to fancy dinner parties “rose and fell according to the success, not of my books, but of my movies.”

The four movies based on McMurtry novels that the author mentioned above are all excellent.  (Lonesome Dove was actually a TV miniseries, not a movie, but close enough for government work.)

But the books that inspired them were just as good.

*     *     *     *     * 

McMurtry’s greatest talent was his ability to create characters that the readers of his books and the viewers of the movies and TV series based on those books cared about.

“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.”

The characters he created not only made the movies based on his novels great, but also were responsible for those movies being produced in the first place.

“I can write characters that major actors want to play, and that's how movies get made,” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  “People want to play my characters, major actors that you can get money for, from a bank.  You've got to finance it, and nobody's come up with a better way to finance it than the star system.”

The actors who have won or been nominated for Oscars or Emmys for their work in Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove are a remarkable group: Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diana Lane.

All told, the three movies in that group were nominated for 26 Academy Awards, winning ten.  Throw in Brokeback Mountain – McMurtry won an Oscar for its screenplay, which was based not on one of his novels but on an Annie Proulx short story – and those numbers climb to 34 and 13.

*     *     *     *     *

As good as those movies were, they don’t match up to the epic four-part miniseries that was made from McMurtry’s most well-known novel, Lonesome Dove, which won the 1986 Pulitzer prize for fiction.  The public and the critics loved it – it attracted huge audiences, and was nominated for an astonishing 18 Emmy nominations.  

“People are always telling me that I had everything to do with [the Lonesome Dove miniseries],” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  ‘The people that had everything to do with it are the producers, the writers, the set designers, all the people that actually worked on it.  I was never on the set.  I turned the key in the ignition. I didn't drive the car.”

McMurtry’s modesty is admirable, but he did quite a bit more than just turn the key in the ignition, as Robert Duvall – who starred in both The Godfather and Lonesome Dove – observed:

I was fortunate enough to be in the biggest thing in American cinema history and American television history, The Godfather, parts one and two, and Lonesome Dove.  Now, The Godfather was better directed, but the novel was only okay; the movies went beyond it.  For Lonesome Dove, we had to do everything we could to come up to the level of the novel.  Whether we really did, I don’t know.

*     *     *     *     *

Larry McMurtry’s only child, James, is an Austin-based singer-songwriter who has released a dozen albums.

Here’s what his father wrote about him in 2008:

[I]t seems to me his best songs are as good as anyone’s best songs.  Indeed, I suspect that the mark he has made artistically is more likely to be indelible than the mark I have made.  Great songs outlast all but the greatest prose.

I’ve just scratched the surface of James McMurtry’s recordings, but it looks like his songs – like his father’s novels – are full of interesting characters.

James McMurtry

That’s certainly the case with today’s featured song, “Choctaw Bingo,” which is about a family reunion at the home of an aging ex-bootlegger from Texas who has moved to Oklahoma, where he cooks crystal meth and plays bingo every Friday night at the local Indian casino. 

Two of the meth-cooker’s nieces are sisters who make the drive from Baxter Springs, Kansas – a town that was only a stone’s throw from the small city I grew up in.  The singer of the song doesn’t hesitate to admit that he has had impure thoughts about them:

Ruth Ann and Lynn, they wear them cut-off britches

And them skinny little halters

And they’re second cousins to me

Man, I don’t care, I want to get between ‘em . . .

Do some sister twisters ’til the cows come home

And we’ll be havin’ us a time

The family get-together takes place in a small town just off U.S. 69 – a highway I used to drive from my hometown (Joplin, Missouri) to Houston when I was a college student there.

Back when I drove U.S. 69, it was mostly a two-lane affair that nonetheless attracted a lot of truck traffic, who moved slowly enough that other drivers were constantly making risky attempts to pass.  As a result, someone printed up a bumper sticker that I saw more than once on others cars that were navigating that road: “Pray For Me – I Drive U.S. 69.”

Click here to listen to “Choctaw Bingo,” which was released in 2002 on McMurtry’s Saint Mary of the Woods album. 

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

James McMurtry – "Copper Canteen" (2015)

Honey, don’t you be yelling at me

When I’m cleaning my gun

“I was a minor regional novelist from Texas,” the late author Larry McMurtry once told an interviewer. “That’s all I was.”

McMurtry’s novels were often set in Texas, and those that weren’t usually featured Texans or former Texans.  So I won’t quibble with “regional novelist from Texas” as a description of McMurtry – although that terms understates the variety of his fiction.  

Larry McMurtry in 1972

But “minor” is another matter.  I don’t see how anyone can think that someone who wrote 32 novels over a 53-year span – many of which are excellent, and one of which is as credible a contender for the “The Great American Novel” crown as any other novel yet written – can be described as “minor.”

McMurtry was more than a novelist, by the way – he wrote about a dozen non-fiction books, all of which are worth reading.

*     *     *     *     *

I haven’t lived in Texas in well over forty years, but Texas is a very important part of my identity – my time there in the 1970s had a significant influence on who I am today.

Doug Sahm’s music and Larry McMurtry’s books were quintessentially Texan, although neither man was what you would picture when you heard the word “Texan.”

Sahm died over 20 years ago.  Now McMurtry is gone as well – he died last week at age 84.  

*     *     *     *     *

I first became aware of McMurtry when I saw the movie that was made from his third novel, The Last Picture Show, in 1971.

I was a sophomore at Rice University in Houston at the time.  McMurtry had gotten a master’s degree in English from Rice and taught there for several years – I think he left Rice the year before I started there.  

I naturally read The Last Picture Show after seeing the movie – the movie was truly remarkable, but the book was just as good.  

But what hooked me on McMurtry’s writing were three novels he wrote in the early 1970s – while I was a student – that were set in Houston and that featured characters who were Rice graduate students.  

When I say I was “hooked” on McMurtry’s writing, I’m not kidding around – I’ve read 25 of his 32 novels and several of his nonfiction books.  I hope to read the rest of them by the end of this summer.

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I think the key to McMurtry’s success as a novelist was his gift for creating characters that his readers cared about.

An appreciation of McMurtry that appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette after his death hit the nail on the head:

Larry McMurtry had a way of creating perfect characters in his writing.  You fell in love with his characters.  You wanted to meet his characters. You wanted to be in the book with his characters.  Then he’d put his characters through a meat grinder.

Indeed he did.  McMurtry killed off his characters without hesitation.  I still remember the shock I felt when one of the characters in his 2002 novel, Sin Killer, died a violent death.  I don’t remember anything about the character except that he was male and that I immediately liked him – but before I really got to know him, McMurtry killed him.  It seemed like such of a waste of a good character – a character who could have contributed to making that novel satisfying.

But McMurtry seemed to have no compunctions when it came to finishing off his characters.  “Plenty more where he came from,” seemed to be his attitude.  And he was right.

McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Oscar 
for their “Brokeback Mountain” script

More from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette appreciation:

There was something very un-romantic about Larry McMurtry's writing, even when romance was involved for the characters. . . . McMurtry didn't dress up his stories and present them with a nice bow.  That's not real.  That's not life.  Sure, romance is a part of being a human, but anybody who thinks we all end up with romance isn't living in the real world.  Or at least not living in Texas.

Life is difficult.  Texas is difficult.  The only thing (seemingly) effortless was the way Larry McMurtry created characters. And let them lead the way into his plots, and their own lives. It seemed so effortless that we sometimes got the feeling that Mr. McMurtry didn't know where the characters were going, either, and he was only documenting their travels. And their eventual crossings.

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The 19th-century British novelist Anthony Trollope was a remarkably prolific and disciplined writers.

For much of life, Trollope was a high-ranking civil servant, who travelled extensively, and lived an active social life – he was particularly fond of fox hunting – but managed to write almost 50 novels.

From an article on the Trollope Society’s website:

[Trollope] would usually rise every morning at 5:30 to get his writing done before he went into the office. “Three hours a day,” he declared, “will produce as much as a man ought to write.  But he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours – so have tutored his mind that it, shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas.”

He finished each of his novels within a few months of starting it, working literally to a timetable: “When I have commenced a book,” he explained, “I have alway’s prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face – and demanding of me increased labour.”  If he wasted a week or even a day he would scrawl, “Alas!” in his diary and repent bitterly of his sloth.

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McMurtry – who was a busy dealer in rare books as well as a writer – was equally disciplined.  He got in the habit of writing five double-spaced pages a day when he was a 23-year-old graduate student, and never really stopped until his death.

After the success of Lonesome Dove – a best-selling book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was turned into one of the best and most successful TV miniseries of all time – you might have thought McMurtry might have been content to rest on his laurels.  But he wasn’t.

From a 2016 Texas Monthly piece about McMurtry: 

What he did was continue to write – relentlessly, pounding out his five pages daily on [a manual typewriter]. . . . He seemed to issue forth a book every year or so, sometimes twice a year. He wrote another Old West novel [and] a sequel to The Last Picture Show [and] a sequel to Terms of Endearment . . . . He wrote more screenplays and composed book reviews and literary essays for such publications as the New York Review of Books.

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According to the author of that Texas Monthly article about McMurtry, he was anything but introspective when it came to his writing:

[A]sk McMurtry about his writing – why he became a writer in the first place, or what inspires him, or if there’s an underlying meaning to his fiction, or any other such forced attempt at introspection – and he is steadfastly unreflective.  “I like making stuff up,” he told me, simply.

When I tried again – What about process?  Did he ever get stuck developing a plot?  Seize up sometimes before a blank page? – he sighed.  “I just write,” he replied.  “You either do it, or you don’t.”

Nor does he have any particular desire to discuss the characters he has created or the books he has written.  “As soon as I finish a novel and ship it to the publisher,” he told me, “I almost immediately lose interest in it and never read it again.”

“Even Lonesome Dove?” I asked.

“I’ve never reread it.  I don’t hang on to any of my books.  If I did that, I wouldn’t have time to think about what I’m going to do next.”

I looked at him for a few seconds to see if he was joking.  He looked right back at me, his face impassive.

(You can click here to read that entire Texas Monthly piece – it’s well worth the time.)

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I would never compare myself to McMurtry as an author – I may have a big ego, but I’m not delusional – but we’re not totally dissimilar in our approaches to writing.

Like him, I just write – even when I don’t really have anything to say.  (That’s not an infrequent occurrence, as my regular readers know.)  But when you commit to producing roughly 125 posts a year, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for your muse to inspire you.  

McMurtry in his bookstore in 2012

And like McMurtry, I don’t spend much time looking back.  Once I’ve finished a post, it’s on to the next one – on occasion I will revisit an old post, but that’s the exception, not the rule.  

A reviewer once said that McMurtry writes so much that “supply outstrips demand,” and that “a lot of [McMurtry’s] stuff verges on being . . . typed rather than written.”  

I agree that not all of McMurtry’s novels are good – I would say that roughly half of them are nothing special.

I won’t try to put a number on how many 2 or 3 lines posts are nothing special, but it’s certainly more than half.  

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Larry McMurtry’s only child, James, is a singer-songwriter who has released a dozen albums.  

Today’s featured song is from his most recent one, 2015’s Complicated Game.

From Allmusic:

[McMurtry] is one of the best American songwriters in the game, inhabiting the lives of the people he writes about with an unaffected sincerity . . . and filling his lyrics with telling details that are sometimes witty, sometimes affecting, and always brilliantly observed.

Sounds like he learned a few tricks from his father.

By the way, James’s son (and Larry’s grandson) Curtis is also a recording artist.

James and Curtis McMurtry

Click here to listen to “Copper Canteen.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.