Literary Austin Book

Here's my review of "Literary Austin" that appeared in "Texas Books and Review" -- the mildly critical review really pissed Don Graham off! He even sent as sharp rebuttal for the next issue of TBR. (and he later wrote the most negative review of Dallas 1963 that Minutaglio and I received. And Don got the last laugh-- HIS review was published in the Dallas Morning News.)

I have a lot of respect for Don Graham. He's been a leading, strong-minded Texas literary critic for generations but the truth is he's always been weak when it comes to recognizing the contributions of non-white writers to Texas culture. His omissions in "Literary Austin" are hardly the first example of his blindness in that regard, and that deserved to be called out in a review. As for the UT-centric nature of this book, well, I guess it's no secret that both Austin and UT-Austin share an immense self-regard.

Literary Austin:

Austin has been a hipster's paradise ever since a bank teller named William Sydney Porter financed his underground paper, The Rolling Stone, by making unauthorized withdrawals against his employer's account. Porter, or, O. Henry, as he later became known, left Austin rather suddenly. But not before he published an irreverent history of the town in the June 9, 1894 edition his paper: "They got a gun and killed off all the Indians between the lunatic asylum and the river, and laid out Austin," he wrote. "It has been laid out ever since."

Since Porter's time, generations of writers have weighed in on the city's charms, and Don Graham collects many of the best, including O. Henry, into his new anthology, Literary Austin. The result is a book that provides an engaging portrait of the city, especially if one enjoys the part of Austin that's centered around the University of Texas. Those looking for a broader treatment, however, may come away somewhat disappointed.

A great number of the selections are contributed by Graham's colleagues within the University of Texas's English and Creative Writing departments. Several more selections chronicle campus life, as a veritable parade of writers describe their favorite professors and the exact moments at which they became introduced to the world of ideas. Three of the most beloved men associated with the university'the Texas Triumvirate of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek, appear in several excerpts, and the occasion of José Luis Borges's visit to the university qualifies for two more. Even mass murderer Charles Whitman, who rained gunfire down from the UT Tower, is the subject of three selections. Longhorn football is represented by Julius Whittier's memoir describing his experience as one of the first African Americans to play for the team, along with Betsy Berry's charming short story about a tutor, "Toot," as she's known, who's called upon to help the players stay academically eligible as they pursue a national championship.

In contrast to this exhaustive treatment of the university, Austin's role as the state's political capital barely registers, nor is much space given towards explaining how it got to be "The Live Music Capital of the World." Nor will Literary Austin dispel tensions between Graham and critics who claim that he doesn't pay enough attention to Mexican American writers'the omission of famed East Austin poet raúlrsalinas is startling. The book is so ethnically homogenous that it could almost be called Literary White Austin.

The anthology, however, does contain many excellent pieces that immerse readers in such Austin institutions as the Scholz Garten, Whole Foods, and Barton Springs. The book is remarkably effective at tracking Austin's transformation from a laid-back oasis into a sprawling, traffic-choked megalopolis. The signature piece in this regard is Robert Draper's "Adios to Austin." Draper recalls Austin as "one big unswept patio of groovy daydreamers," where "it was OK to crash parties and make off with as many links of barbecued sausage as you could jam into your denim jacket…Everyone was broke and everything was beautiful." Gradually, however, Austin became "a place where one could earn a fortune…Yesterday's philosophy grad student became today's Webmaster. All writers great and small began to craft screenplays." Before long, Draper writes, the city became a "generic colossus of Greater Silicon Valley, a wasteland so smug and culturally vapid that Dallas circa 1963 seems flamboyant by comparison."

Despite its vaunted quirkiness, Austin's hip white culture, as it turns out, may be mostly derivative and based on the cliquish behavior that Larry McMurtry first observed back in 1968: "Groupiness was endemic," McMurtry wrote. "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." In Don Graham's own short story, "Ghosts and Empty Sockets," included in this anthology, he notes that such cliquishness "drove the fuse that flared, however flickeringly, through the now paling life of this party."