Don't be a fool, stay in school

They tell you no matter how much preparation you have, you will never be ready for your first year of teaching. After much research, I've narrowed down what I think it's going to be like to the following two scenarios:

Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland of Earthly Delights

I love the awesome destructive power of Mother Nature. We had a kick-ass storm last night. I had been reading Flannery O'Connor short stories for about four hours straight when giant, perpetual thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and hail came barreling through town. Today, I grabbed my iPod and headphones and took a long walk all over the neighborhood. Besides the blanket of leaves and mud covering almost everything, I saw this stuff:
1) A sidewalk covered in dead birds. The wind and rain must have slapped them out of the trees, but it looked like some huge musclehead type had picked up each bird individually and threw them down on the sidewalk as hard as he could. Splat! You birds got pranked hard!
2) A huge tree branch that fell and landed on a Blazer, knocking the automobile's tailgate off, smashing all the windows out, and basically imploding it.
3) A rusty nail that I stepped on. Not only that, it was a Warner Brothers-cartoon-sized rusty nail. I thought a giant rock had wedged itself into the bottom of my shoe. Fortunately, the sharp part of the nail was bent and went through my shoe without going through my foot. A tetanus shot would have soured my afternoon.
4) An albino squirrel! Hot damn, I couldn't believe my luck. Doesn't it say in the Book of Revelations, "And an albino squirrel shall lead them?" I'm going back out on the streets later to find the squirrel, trap him, and teach him to read, write, and speak. Together, we are going to pitch a buddy-cop film idea to Paramount Pictures. I haven't decided yet whether I will be played by William H. Macy or Bernie Mac. The squirrel will play himself. We aren't going to like each other at first, me being a loose cannon who plays by his own rules, and the squirrel being a by-the-book straight shooter two years from retirement. Eventually, we bond over our shared love of tandoori chicken, the music of Roberta Flack, and taking no-good punks off the street.

Fighter Hayabusa vs. King Slender

Hey, everybody. My brother restarted his blog. Read it here.

Problems and solutions. Just kidding, I have no solutions.

When you have nothing to say, throw pies. Sometimes it's absolutely goddamn embarrassing to be a liberal.



Here's the mega-retarded YouTube description:
"Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled 'Green is the new Red White and Blue' was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its 'natural place in the global order.' Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a suprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating:

----------

Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face...

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism's conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of 'green' - the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

* for his pure arrogance.
On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists -- we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman's 'Green' as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face."

On behalf of the earth? The earth doesn't give a fuck about Thomas Friedman, pies, the U.S., Iraq, Palestine, Israel, environmentalists, or Greenwash Guerrillas. The earth will outlast the whole puny shebang. By the way, the U.S. military is NOT the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. That would be China, you dreadlocked fucknuts, who recently overtook the U.S. as a whole (not just the military). I'm not defending the U.S. military, I'm just stating some very quickly researched facts that are available to any human being who has two minutes and an Internet connection or science teacher nearby. Come on, assholes. Also, you morons seem to think that cool-whip is toxic. I ran some experiments on this over the weekend. I fed cool-whip to several small children. Guess what? Non-fucking-toxic.

Don't blame me, I voted for Motorhead.
(Just to clarify for some people who thought I was a Libertarian. I am not a Libertarian. I am also not a Republican. I am a hedonist with a heart of gold.)

By the way, the first thing I do every morning, as a committed environmentalist, is print a bunch of fucking leaflets.

Aw jeez! Gimme a break!

On campus yesterday, a pigeon flying overhead urinated on my arm. I had to duck into the nearest building and take the escalator to the second floor bathrooms while holding my arm in a stiff, awkward, unnatural position so the pissy dribble would remain relatively stable pooled in the crook of my arm and not trickle down, contaminating more of my flesh and dripping on my t-shirt and/or jeans. Sorry I used the word "arm" so much in that sentence, but there aren't too many useful synonyms. Left gun? Foreshank? Upper appendage? Torso-leg? Cannon #1? Hand-post? Lucille? At any rate, even after multiple scrubbings, I still felt my torso-leg was unclean. I didn't feel like Dr. Mystery again until I got home, changed my clothes, and scrubbed my hand-post several more times. Pigeon urine? What kind of jive is that?

By the way, the photo accompanying this post is the first one that popped up when I Google image searched "pigeon urine." The man in the photo is a tannery worker in Morocco, dying hides. The red dye is made of pigeon excrement, acids, and cow urine. I shit you not. Get it? Shit? Am I right? Factoid: The country of Morocco is no relation to retired professional wrestler Magnificent Muraco, who is from Sunset Beach, Hawaii and spells his name differently. His opinions on animal urine are, as yet, unknown.

Don't blame me, I voted for Chocolate Thunder

We watched Wrestlemania 2 yesterday. I hadn't seen it since 1986, when I was too young to appreciate the absurdity of the following match:
A boxing match between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Mr. T.
Guest ring announcer: Joan Rivers
Guest commentator: Susan St. James (from Kate & Allie)
Guest timekeeper: Herb from the Burger King ads
Guest judges: NBA star Darryl "Chocolate Thunder" Dawkins, Cab Calloway, and G. Gordon Liddy

We live in the best of all possible worlds.



(Some facts about Darryl Dawkins: He was the first guy to shatter the backboard with his dunks. The first time he did it, Kansas City Kings player Bill Robinzine was standing under the hoop and had to duck for cover. Dawkins named the dunk the "Chocolate Thunder Flying, Glass Flying, Robinzine Crying, Babies Crying, Glass Still Flying, Catch Crap, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Thank You, Wham, Bam, I Am Jam." He later named other dunks the Rim Wrecker, the Go-Rilla, the Look Out Below, the In-Your-Face Disgrace, the Cover Your Head, the Yo-Mama, and the Spine-Chiller Supreme. He also told the press that he was an "alien from the planet Lovetron," he spent the off-season practicing "interplanetary funkmanship," and his girlfriend on Lovetron was named "Juicy Lucy." I almost like sports now.)

Miscellany

1) This week's Louis Black turd-dump. Pick your poison.
Clunky sentence construction? "Central to my thesis here is the argument that if you examine any major historical event closely, you are going to find an enormous collection of bits of information that don't fit in with the overall theory of what happened."
Foolish absolutist pronouncement? "The U.S. Constitution can be read and misread any number of ways." Since Black uses the word misread here, it follows that his use of read must mean read correctly. In that case, there are NOT any number of ways to correctly read the U.S. Constitution or any other text, goddammit. The words are on the page. Read them closely, re-read them, and figure it out. Tricycle does not mean banana, unless the author tells you it does.
Very completely totally redundant word choice? "All too often, those on every side of every argument confuse the two (reality and opinion), using completely loaded language to bless themselves and validate their causes." What does the word completely add to that sentence? How about both sides of an argument instead of every side of every argument? How about letting an editor look over your column? I promise you he or she will not rob you of your writerly essence by cleaning up and tightening your prose. Your answers to questions nobody asked will remain pungently fecal (fecally pungent?).
2) My professor in my Lit Studies for High School Teachers of English class was trying to remember Crispin Glover's name today. He described him and some of his films but couldn't quite pull his name out of the ether, so I said "Crispin Glover?" Only three other people in the class had heard of him. He was in the Charlie's Angels movies, for cry eye! One girl turned to me and said, "Crispus Laughlin?" Then she had me write his name down on a sheet of paper for her, presumably for impending investigation into the Glover oeuvre. Very odd. This is my only class where people have a vague impression that something happened on earth before No Doubt became famous. I figured Crispin Glover had a place in the English major pantheon. Come on. This class pledged love for Little Richard last week. I honestly don't know what's going on. I'm learning interesting, baffling things about twenty-year-olds every day.
3) This morning, while walking to class, I noticed a burly athletic type hurriedly walking through campus while eating a large piece of bright-pink cake on a paper plate. What? Cake is not your typical on-the-go foodstuff, especially when speedwalking, double especially when the eater is hypermasculine and the eatee is bright pink. He had a huge bite precariously perched on his little plastic fork, I'm talking HUGE, pretty much half of the entire piece of cake, and when he brought this enormous bite to his mouth, it slipped off the fork and landed on the dirty ground. He then yelled, "Aw, FUCK!" and stormed angrily along. I can't tell you how happy this whole scene made me.

Danny Federici 1950-2008

The E Street Band organist/pianist/keyboardist/accordionist died last week, giving me an excuse to post more YouTube clips.

Louis Black Poop-Stained Poop of the Week

The gag is that I don't always do this every week. Here's this "week's" narcissistic bilge:

"Wouldn't we all actually be better off if, instead of grading the morality, humanity, and righteousness of all others, we instead worked upon improving ourselves? This would mean actually working on change rather than anointing ourselves, judged against the standards of those of whom we disapprove. The too easily and consistently glib will accuse me of doing exactly what I condemn here, but that is just a kind of lazy desperation to dismiss troubling arguments. I condemn no person or persons, nor do I celebrate or redeem myself in any way. Of course I wish I were a better person. Of course I am just as trapped by my emotions, experiences, and self-centered ways when dealing with the world as anyone. No Zen loss of 'self' here. No large-picture arguments against selfishness or in favor of losing identity or addressing the defining oneness of us all."

Troubling arguments? The only thing troubling is how this guy writes all the time and never improves. You'd think he'd accidentally stumble into a coherent sentence once in a while.

Here's a bonus boneheaded play from last week:

"Usually in this column, I at least try to cover every minor thoroughfare branching off from the highway of the main idea, mostly to protect the argument I'm making from being dismissed too easily because of a factor not considered or a potential not discussed (of course, many of my ideas are dismissed, so the emphasis here is on the 'too easily'). What follows is just a brief checklist on some positions, so no discussion is fully rounded or being too carefully presented."

You protect your ideas from being dismissed too easily by smothering them in incoherent, irrelevant digressions? Give clear, well-constructed sentences a try some time. It will probably work better. Maybe people dismiss your ideas because they can't find them.

Belated Krautrockdolences

Klaus Dinger, former drummer of Kraftwerk and one-half of Neu!, died last month.

Louis Black Syntax Atrocity of the Week

The set-up: Black wrote his column this week about how so-called solutions to the illegal immigration "problem" (his quotation marks, though I agree with his use of them) would cause a lot of damage. In his introduction, he writes that most people, regardless of political ideology, feel that the U.S. government is broken. He disagrees with these people, with one caveat. This caveat gives us our Louis Black prose nugget of the week:

"(As always, I exempt the current administration from this discussion because there is nothing you can say about it that is so bad that I won't agree with you -- but rather than interpreting it as symptomatic of whatever one's beliefs are about federal failures, I still view it as an extreme, diseased aberration that, as with cancer, has its origins in many different political trends but is solely owned by none of them.)"

So, cancer is caused by a combination of political trends? What? Did you hear the news? Tony's uncle died today from cancer of the testicles. They think it was caused by a combination of stagflation, Orange Alerts, and speculation about Anderson Cooper's sexuality.

Stuff to see and do

The sound cuts out a little bit at the beginning of this 1980s Magnum T.A. interview, but stick with it, the payoff is great.


Also, if you were thinking about giving some money to starving children, stop thinking that and give your money to these guys instead so they can finish their film about the ridiculously great rock and roll combo Silkworm:

"Hello everyone-

(my apologies to anyone who has already received this and/or donated)

As most of you know, we have been making this film since August of 2006. Financed out of our own pockets as well as by our family members, we have interviewed almost 60 people including Jeff Tweedy, Steve Albini, Matt Kadane, Stephen Malkmus, Tim and Andy’s parents, Jason Molina, Gerard Cosloy, and so many more friends, family, fans, and rock critics.

So you’re probably wondering why this is of any importance to you? Well, here’s the deal:

Unfortunately, this sort of independent filmmaking always ends up taking longer than expected. We were hoping to have a finished cut by August or September of this year but with the current financing, that’s a slim possibility. We were able to make the last trip to California thanks to the 30+ people who kindly donated to the cause. There are over 200 of you on our mailing list. If everyone donated five dollars that would be a huge step towards making our final trip and beginning editing.

If you can’t donate, we would appreciate it if you could post this message on your blog or website, write about it on forums, do whatever you can to get the word out to people who would like to. Everyone who donates will be credited in the film. As soon as we’re finished, we will be traveling to festivals, independent art house theaters and rock clubs to show the finished cut. Hopefully this will happen in a town near you.

If you would like to contribute to the completion of the film, please follow the PayPal link below:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=silkworm_documentary%40yahoo%2ecom&item_name=Couldn%27t%20You%20Wait%3f%20The%20Story%20of%20Silkworm&no_shipping=0&no_note=1&tax=0&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dDonationsBF&charset=UTF%2d8

THANKS

Seth Pomeroy (director)
Shawn Girvan (producer)

ALSO: if you would like to see interview clips we’ve done in addition to the trailer and performance clips, check out our youtube page: www.youtube.com/HargroveHouse

People ten years younger than me haven't heard of anything

I'm continually surprised by the complete lack of cultural reference points (or context for available reference points) my mostly decade-younger fellow students exhibit in class discussions. The immediate present (or context-free reference to the recent past) is the only thing that seems to exist. I know I'm looking at the world with ten extra years of jackassery under my belt, and I allow a lot of concessions for that. When I was 18-21, I never rented any movies that predated the late 1960s, and I hardly ever rented any non-American films. My musical taste was narrower and rooted in the present and near-past, and I stuck to the 20th century in my choice of books. However, I spent those years slowly expanding my repertoire, and I had at least heard of a lot of stuff I hadn't yet experienced. I know it's the American way to be lazy, complacent, hostile to any kind of intellectual self-improvement, and stuck in the present, and knowing a lot of cultural references isn't really that important unless you experience the work behind these references, but sweet christ, the cultural history of the twentieth century sure seems irrelevant to today's newest adults (hereafter referred to as post-pubes) (not really). Even when they know who someone is, they know him or her from some of the most irrelevant shit he or she has ever made. Examples, overheard in my classes: "Who's that guy from As Good As It Gets? Oh yeah, Jack Nicholson." A group report about the film Red River in my Life and Lit of the Southwest class included a presentation about Howard Hawks. The girl giving the presentation mentioned some of the many actors Hawks either discovered or featured in their first important roles. James Caan was one of these actors. The girl said: "He's the guy from Elf." This makes me feel 10,000 years old, even though I'm pretty new to the planet myself.
Interestingly, the reference points of the middle school kids I'm observing and student teaching this semester are much more expansive than the 20-year-olds in my classes who've never heard of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Stanley Kubrick, Charlie Parker, Gary Cooper, the L.A. riots, Henry Kissinger, H.L. Mencken, the Fat Boys, Foreigner, Liz Phair, or the Sex Pistols. The middle school kids have heard of more writers, bands, and songs than my fellow English and education majors (though they claim every book is either "stupid" or "boring.") I've heard students singing 1970s and '80s metal, pre-fame R.E.M., sixties bubblegum pop, Nirvana's non-hits, and '80s gangsta rap and new wave. When I asked them about their favorite movies, Fried Green Tomatoes had a place in the pantheon. (Not a good movie, but, hey! It predates their existences!) I was baffled by this for weeks until I realized a lot of the parents of these 13-year-olds aren't much older than me. If I had more muscle tone, athleticism, stupidity, street smarts, a non-fear of rejection, a fear of latex, easier access to booze, and less access to drugs, heavy metal, and/or unrequited love in high school, I could be the father of a 13-year-old right now. So, this obsession with the present only (unless referenced on Family Guy) is a temporary, generational thing is all I'm saying, and I will stop worrying about it. Thanks, middle school loudmouth brats! You have actually heard of things that aren't really important but make Dr. Mystery feel better about the state of young adulthood and the health of this country's cultural references of yesterday, tomorrow, today, tomorrow.

Louis Black still sucks! Evidence here!

Soft-rock the Vote

I wish I could say this is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen, but our culture delivers gems like this every minute.

When people come up to me and ask me how to become a world champion, I say, "Forget it. It's gotta be in your DNA."

One of the only good things that happened to me last week was seeing The King of Kong.

My grandmother died this morning. It was more expected than my aunt's death, but the timing of all these recent traumatic events has definitely been a shock and my immune system has taken a long vacation from the rest of me. At the risk of sounding like those idiots who say things like, "God has another angel now," or "She always had a smile on her face," (Really? Always? And no one committed her?), I want to say that my grandmother was, and probably always will be, the best person I ever knew. She based every decision, even the tiny ones, on her moral/ethical code and never wavered from it. She had a great sense of humor and absurdity, and it always made her laugh when somebody did something foolish, including herself. She constantly read books until her eyesight got too bad a few years ago, and she was a great painter. She was my biggest fan (though she would have been extremely disappointed at all the profanity on my blog), and the last words she said to me, as I left the nursing home with my uncle and his two dogs to ride to Denver International Airport less than two weeks ago, were: "You're a good-looking man. All your female students are going to have a crush on you." Then she said she wished she was going with me. She spent the majority of her last month listening to spirituals by Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and telling us all how great we were and how lucky she was to have us. I'm glad she won't have to spend another day in the nursing home. She complained about the patronizing way the employees talked to her, even though she had more on the ball than they did.
My time alone in the cave of despair has been extended for a few more weeks. I can't wait until this blog can be about people who won't take gorilla masks off, how much I hate Louis Black, and how many nachos I can eat in one sitting again.

Return from the Great White Middle

I'm finally done blasting through the tower of babble of school work that had been piling up since everything went to hell family-style three weeks ago. After a week spent burying my 50-year-old aunt, putting my wonderful grandmother in the nursing home the day after the funeral, only to have her fall and break her hip today (which was the only reason we put her in there in the first place, so she wouldn't fall), and having my flight home delayed for several hours because of snow only to land in Austin in 30 mph winds that tossed the plane around like a ball of string slapped by a disinterested cat, I'm no longer intimidated by the middle school kids I will be teaching in a couple weeks. There are far scarier things in the world. It was an emotionally raw week back home in western Neb. (home of original member of The Eagles, Randy Meisner). A lot of ups and downs. It wasn't all misery. I went out to an abandoned ranch and shot guns with my uncles, cousin, and cousin-in-law. I hit a blue rock target dead-on the first time I've ever shot a shotgun in my life. My second shot was a complete joke, and I didn't shoot anymore after that. I went to a bonfire at my cousin's the night of the funeral and confirmed how much I like my mom's side of the family and how lucky I was to be born into such an interesting, funny, unusual group of people in such a boring, unfunny, usual town. My uncle and his late wife have a bottomless group of friends whose existence in small-town Nebraska continually surprises me. They don't seem to have regular jobs, just mysterious incomes, and can only be found at bars, weddings, funerals, my uncle's house, and isolated country roads. I never see them in town for any other reason. Most of them wear leather and/or jean jackets. I'm too lazy to give them their descriptive due, so instead I will offer a formula that helps to explain these mysterious strangers' personalities. Add the essences of the following people, fictional characters, and organizations: Charles Bukowski, Jeff Foxworthy, Timothy Leary, Jack Nicholson's character in "Easy Rider," the TV shows "Roseanne" and "The Andy Griffith Show," every member of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the Sasquatch, and "The Muppet Show" band = my uncle's friends. They all have nicknames like Choffey, Orf, Buffalo Legs, Bones, Moo, Donkey Patrol, and Inspector UFO (I only made the last two up). These people are basically cosmic hippie redneck biker philosopher-poets and their lives make up a secret history of small-town existence. I meet a different one every time I go home for a non-holiday visit and hang around long enough. My uncle and Choffey exchange a large rock every seven years. Whoever has current possession of the rock adds a couple new lines to the poem they've been writing on it for many years. At the bonfire, one of these men regaled us with a Cormac McCarthy-worthy tale of drug deals gone bad, prison time served, and $25,000 buried in the countryside near where we were drinking. The way these people talk should be written down. Unintentional poetry. Orf started calling one of my uncles Dangerous Dan McGrew and said he rode into town with a "lion on his back for a coat and a bear for a horse." My newly widowed uncle said one of the saddest, truest things I've ever heard about loss of a family member without any maudlin wordiness. What my grandmother calls the "unvarnished truth." This is what he said about his second day without his wife: "I went to the bar. Had two beers. Went home. Fell asleep in a chair. Woke up and made myself a chicken pot pie. It wasn't any good."

My aunt Donna died this morning. She was only 50. Here's what kind of person she was: When I was six or seven, she called my house to let me know that an all-day monster movie marathon was on HBO. I rode my bike over and watched movies all day with her. When I was 17, I grew a really stupid goatee that I thought was cool. My boss at the grocery store told me to shave it off. My aunt told me to tell him, "Fuck you, Tim." She was a fun person who liked to read and liked music. She had a lot of problems the last ten or twelve years that led to her early death, but that doesn't matter. From the daily phone reports I received from my mother this last week about her sister-in-law and my aunt, I learned a lot about how to die with bravery, dignity, self-respect, and humor. I feel bad for my uncle and my cousins. I spent a lot of time over there when I was a kid, listening to their records and baby-sitting their kids. It's been hard trying to get through my week and take care of business. You should be able to pause life sometimes for a few weeks. I would like to ask anyone reading this to please not email me, call me, or personally give me any condolences. I sincerely appreciate any good thoughts and concern, but please just send it out into the world silently. The English language is woefully inadequate when it comes to condolences. I know you care. I don't need to hear it. I will probably keep to myself for a few months. That's how I get through these things best. I need the shared history, comfortable silences, and humor of my family and my own self for a while. Then I'll crawl back out of my cave and get on with it. Send all good thoughts to your families (if you like them) and enjoy their company. If any of you have emailed or left a message, etc., before you've read this post, don't feel bad. I'm weird and solitary about this stuff, and I appreciate your concern. Life is good, and I'm glad I know so many good people.

Whoo!

For the first time in 12 years, I had the flu. It sucked. I think I'm coming out of it now, but for a while, I was burning the candle at both ends, if you know what I mean.

I'm considering trying Netflix, and I was browsing their inventory this morning when I stumbled across the greatest movie title in Mexican cinema history:
7 Mujeres, 1 Homosexual y Carlos*


*For those of you with even worse Spanish than me, that translates as "7 Women, 1 Homosexual and Carlos."

Larry McMurtry on Austin

Nothing much has changed. Just replace "protohippies" with the Beauty Bar crowd or anyone's moderately ambitious local rock band. Throw the Austin Chronicle staff in the mix, too. His description still fits this town a little too snugly, and sometimes his words are even more accurate today. I like it here. I wouldn't have stayed seven years and counting if I didn't. But this is a distressingly honest summation of Austin.

"... During the last two months of my stay in Austin it was my good fortune to be thrown much in the company of (author William) Brammer. We were both, at the time, in respite of wives and money, and shared a house on Windsor Road. Mr. Brammer was at that time the local culture hero, The Gay Place having been published only two years before. He was thus a natural target for anyone in Austin who was aspiring, frustrated, or bored. The inrush of Wives threatened to wrench the hinges off the door, and Mr. Brammer faced it with the courteous and rather melancholy patience with which he would probably face a buffalo stampede. In the wake of the Wives came a sweaty and verbally diarrhetic mass of bored or bitter professors, broke or bitter politicians, protohippies with beach balls full of laughing gas, and broke-bored-bitter young journalists who looked like they had been using themselves for blotters.
"In time I sealed off my part of the house and left Bill to cope with the crowd as best he could, but during the brief weeks when I spent my nights opening the door I got, it seemed to me, an adequate glimpse of Austin. It had, among other adolescent characteristics, a fascination with its own pubic hair, and a corresponding uneasy fear that its sexual development might stop just short of adequacy. Groupiness was endemic. No one might be missing from the group, lest he turn out to be somewhere better, with a wilder, more swinging group. In such a town the person who is sure of himself is apt to be literally crushed by the surging mobs of the insecure, all rushing to confirm themselves by association. "
...
"Cliquishness can be especially insidious in a town the size of Austin, where those in favor seldom if ever receive any strong-minded local criticism. ..."
...
"The emotional activity most characteristic of Austin is, I think, the attempt to acquire power through knowledge. Accordingly, Austin is the one town in the state where there is a real tolerance of the intellectual; and yet one's final impression of Austin is of widespread intellectual confusion. Perhaps the phenomenon most expressive of this paradox is the University's rare book program. For the last decade, rare books have been sucked into Austin like particles of dust into a vacuum cleaner; the University's enormous and almost amorphous acquisitiveness remains the wonder, joy, and despair of the rare book world. No one can doubt that an extraordinary library is being formed in Austin, one whose potential usefulness is very great; yet the manner in which it is being formed leaves one a trifle abashed. The Humanities Research Center, for all its riches, comes too close to being a kind of intellectual's Astrodome. The University's almost frenzied acquisitiveness seems to stem not so much from a vision of the needs of future generations as from its own immediate intellectual insecurity. A successful acquisition brings a temporary sense of intellectual power, and it is the acquisition of books and manuscripts, rather than their use, which seems to be the dominant concern; that and the creation of a symbol of prestige (the Center) which the scholarly world cannot ignore. ..."

from In a Narrow Grave (1968)