Happy Thanksgiving, Y'all

I wish that I had written this, but it was written by one of Bill Stott's former students, forwarded to me by my former teacher. It sums up; my feelings pretty well -- practice gratitude today and bless you all.

"Today is Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. Because, in addition to the fact that it doesn't have all of the pressure of Christmas, the confused commercial icons of Easter or the bittersweet mix of MLK Day, we celebrate being thankful for all we have. This is one key to happiness that I try and share with as many people as possible: rather than focusing on what we want and do not have and is out of our grasp, thus being always somewhat dissatisfied, it's much more powerful and life-changing to give thanks for the things we do have, even the simplest things, like food in the fridge, friends we love, a job, an education, beautiful weather, a comfortable bed, hot water, great conversations, good shoes, freedom, a healthy mind and body. And so today, I would like to say thanks to you all, for the impact you've made in my life, for helping me on my journey, for the times we've shared, and for all of the wondrous experiences that are continuing to unfold.

"Life is sometimes not so much about what happens, but more about how we perceive the things that do happen. So give this a try: for just a few minutes tonight while lying in bed before drifting off to dreamland, give thanks for all the things you have. And then in the morning, before you climb out of bed, do the same thing. Try it for awhile, and you'll be amazed at how quickly your life changes, and how soon you'll be focusing on life's treasures rather than its forgettable disappointments."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

True dat. I can still remember sitting in bar drinking Guinness and talking with PeteG about the magnificence of Joe Strummer a year ago, or walking down the midway at the State Fair a decade ago with my year-old daughter perched on my shoulders or the smell of a spring evening on the first night I ever kissed my wife. To me, it seems like these things happened just this morning.

And sometimes our past and our present and our future can all become one, all tangled up in memory and possibility. And sometimes, as the great writer Tim O’Brien reminds us, sometimes the past can even save us.

I bought a book at Taylor’s Bookstore in Arlington, Texas in 1991. It was and is called “Write to the Point.” It’s a book about writing by my old professor from the University of Texas, Bill Stott.

Bill was one of my favorite professors at UT. I took a class from him in the spring of 1989 called the History of Photography that he taught with J.B. Colson, a professor of photography in the College of Communication.

To say that the class was a transcendent experience would be an understatement – I don’t believe you can learn about the genius of Walker Evans for the first time and not feel like the world has somehow changed. I spent that summer reading “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” late into the night in a tiny yellow house on 30th Street, smoking Luckies and wondering if I could ever write something that great.

It wasn’t the last experience I had with Bill. I spent more than a few hours talking about Evans and James Agee and documentary expression during his office hours when I was still suffering from the delusion that I would go the grad school. My last semester in Austin, I took one last writing class from Bill and wrote some of the best stuff I ever wrote in college.

The real highlight for me was the way he would grade papers. Students would turn in their assignments in a 9x12 manila envelope with a typewritten paper and a blank audio cassette enclosed. Bill would read your paper aloud, grade it and return it to you. Sound terrifying? It was anything but. Not only do I treasure those memories, I still have the tapes.

That fall, I bought “Write to the Point,” read about five pages, then put it on a shelf.

In spite of my disregard for Bill’s book, I managed to make a career using words, first with eight years as a newspaperman at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then another few years working for Internet startups before spending almost seven years working as a corporate communications consultant for some of the biggest companies in Texas. Then one day in December of last year, I gave the middle finger to my boss after she said I could neither write nor edit.

As liberating as it can be to lay out a giant “fuck you” to someone who doubts your ability, I must confess that this prompted a bit of an existential crisis. I mean, could this person be right?

So I grabbed my copy of “Write to the Point” off the shelf. About half way through this magnificent book, I had an epiphany. Not only could I write, but realized that I learned to write in large part because Bill Stott showed me the way.

As I read, I dog-eared pages, underlined key passages, starred items and wrote things in the margins. Among them:

There is no “perfect way” to writing.

Say what you mean as plainly as you can.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Context matters enormously.

Is it alright to end a sentence with a preposition? Yes.

Try the first words that come to mind because they are the most natural.

Style has no necessary relation to an author’s character.

Writing a bad sentence is natural. All it takes to right a competent sentence is patience and practice.

Write as you talk.

To read these words were an affirmation and a motivation. Ever since, writing has seemed somehow different – easier and effortless. And most days, I feel pretty good about my writing, too. Some people are even kind enough to tell me that they enjoy my writing – including my new boss.

I’m grateful to Bill Stott for his teaching and his patience 20 years ago. And I’m grateful that he wrote a book like “Write to the Point” that was able to say the things I need to hear when I needed to hear them.

When I read the other day about his struggle with cancer, it was like a dagger in the heart. How could something like this happen to someone who is so alive in my memory?

In part, that’s what got me off my ass to write this post. I wrote last year after the passing of another great UT professor, Kurth Sprague, that if I have learned to write at all, then Kurth and Bill Stott and F.J. Schaack were certainly, in part, responsible. I stand behind my previous statement.

But one last thing I underlined in Bill’s book I believe is worth mentioning:

“People think I can teach them style. What stuff it is. Have something to say and say it as plainly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”

So be it. Bill, you were there for me in 1989, and you were there for me again in 2008. You made a difference, and my life is better for having you as my teacher.

Thank you.

Oh, The Humanities!

The Smithsonsian may be America's Attic, but the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas is America's crazy uncle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a fat wallet. It's got a Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1455), the First Photograph (ca. 1826), film archives of David O. Selznick and Robert De Niro, paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and major manuscript collections of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tennessee Williams, and Norman Mailer. It's even got Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The overview of the place in the most recent The New Yorker had me waxing nostalgic a little.

I've got a soft spot for the place because I used to hang there back in my UT days when I was suffering under delusion that a life in academia would be beneficial. Under the influence of Bill Stott's class on Documentary Expression, I spent many hours going through the James Agee Collection researching Agee and Walker Evans and their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Kurth Sprague also gave me a private tour of the Tom Lea Collection. Although the U gets some knocks for being an overwhelming environment that doesn't care about undergrads, I always found lots of great academic opportunities and people willing to nurture your intellectual curiousity if you made the effort.

That said, the HRC gets some knocks because gathering this trove of stuff means throwing down some serious coin. That has some regarding the HRC as a bunch of rich Texans with fat wallets and no appreciation for the significance of the work they are buying. That's selling the HRC a little short. My understanding is they do a great job archiving this material for future generations and making it available to the academics of today. Besides -- to paraphrase Ross Perot -- if God didn't want all that stuff here, he wouldn't have given Texans so damn much money!

Still others wonder "What are Arthur Conan Doyle's Undershirts Doing in Texas?" Or put another way: why would anyone pay good money for some of that shit? Yeah, maybe they don't need the old sandwich found in one of Isaac Singer's boxes, but you never know what is going to provide the "Rosebud Moment," the seemingly unimportant object that is actually the Rosetta Stone for the secrets and meaning of person's life.

Thanks to Emphemera for reminding me to get off my duff and write this.

Three Old Favorites

My new blog friend Walnuts (who I imagine looking like the Sopranos guy) tasked me with the following endeavor: The Little-Known Favorites. Rules: List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people. I've been tagged. So here I go.

Schoolboy Johnson by John R. Tunis. I read this 1958 book when I was a kid back in the 1970s, which probably had something to do with the beginnings of my love of all-things Mid-Century. Schoolboy is a pitcher for the Dodgers who overcomes his travails and masters the change-up under the wise and steady influence of the old veteran Speedy. And as the bookjacket says, "But it took even more than the change-up Speedy taught him, to turn the Schoolboy into a winning pitcher, and a man." Uh, OK. I know how that sounds, but I swear to God it doesn't end up like The History Boys. Anyway, flash forward from fourth grade to college. One of my great professors at Texas, Bill Stott said in passing that the works of John R. Tunis would make a great master's thesis for someone. I decided to be that person, then promptly forgot about it. Sorry, Bill. But, years later, I found this copy of the book at the flea market in Canton, helping me formulate my estate saling thesis that sometimes you find things and sometimes things find you.

Cowtown Moderne by Judith Singer Cohen. This book is a love letter to Fort Worth if there ever was one. My city is blessed with a rich architectural heritage (which you can find out more about here) and some of my favorite buildings are from the 1920s and 1930s -- the Art Deco or Moderne period. Open these pages, and you can find out the detailed history of some of Fort Worth's Art Deco gems like the Kress Building and the Sinclair Building. I first learned about this book during my UT days thanks to Jeff Meikle in the American Studies Department. I loved it and made it my mission to procure my own copy, which wasn't easy because it seems only about five were printed. I found my copy at the old Barber's Books in downtown Fort Worth. Barber's was an old Art Deco-style bookstore that was bought out by Larry McMurtry in the mid- to late-nineties. Larry moved all of the books to his book-o-plex in Archer City, but he didn't get this one. It cost me $75 in 1991, which was about 40 percent of my weekly paycheck, so you know I wanted this book REALLY bad. And I've never regretted buying it. It's a priceless resource.

Slightly Out of Focus by Robert Capa. This is an amazing book by one of the great photographers of the 20th Century. Capa, a Hungarian Jew who fled the rise of Fascism in Europe. Capa tells us about his World War II with a light tone, always displaying humor and humility. It's quite a stunning achievement for someone who was not a native English speaker. Did he have help? A ghost writer? I don't want to know. The narrative flows so easily that I imagine it being told in Capa's heavily accented English. For me, there is another, more personal reason for loving this book. My old family friend, Marcus O. Stevenson, pops up from time to time in the story -- in North Africa, in Sicily, in Normandy. Stevenson lived most of his postwar life in Dallas selling construction equipment. But during the war, he was aide-de-camp to Teddy Roosevelt Jr. and was by his side when the General won the Medal of Honor on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Later had the distinction of being Ernest Hemingway's chaperon during the liberation of Paris. On page 166, you find Hemingway, Capa and Stevenson tear-assing around Normandy in captured Mercedes-Benz with full ration of scotch and enough weapons to arm a full platoon. They soon found themselves caught in the middle of a German ambush that very nearly moved Papa's expiration date forward by 17 years. You want adventure? You want name-dropping? This book is full of great stories like that.

But Slightly Out of Focus is more than a gripping narrative, it's a collection of photos that capture the moments, big and small, of a war. You are there when the Americans storm Omaha Beach, but you also see a little boy sitting on top of a tank during the celebration accompanying the liberation of Paris. The full range of human emotions are there but mostly you find images of life at its most raw. Joy, happiness and exultation. Hate, fear and malice. It's all there.

Thanks for letting me play, Walnuts. Now to tag other people.

UPDATE: The Stash Dauber picks up the gantlet! Good on ya!

Kurth Sprague, 1934-2007

I was with immense sadness that I learned today of the passing of one of the great teachers in my life, Kurth Sprague. If I ever learned anything of writing in my life -- and those who read this blog may find that claim to be debatable -- then Kurth and Bill Stott and F.J. Schaack were certainly, in part, responsible.

Kurth Sprague taught me to write simply and clearly and with a confident voice. He taught me that writing was real work, and like real work, an important part is showing up every day and doing it. He taught me that whatever it took to make it happen -- having exactly eight sharp pencils or a well-oiled typewriter or a bottle of bourbon or a pot of coffee or a pack of Luckies or a Chopin record -- whatever got you in the zone to write, do it and get about the business of writing.

He was the first person who led me to believe that I could actually make a living being a writer. He encouraged me to listen to myself, take some chances and -- sometimes -- ignore what other people said because what did they know anyway. He helped me greatly on the journey to becoming myself.

He was a true gentleman, a product of the the Eastern establishment who would have been right at home in the Oak Room with the Algonquin Roundtable. I remember the first day he strode into class, a tall imposing figure in a seersucker suit with a straw boater. He looked like a mix of John Wayne and Tom Wolfe, which he, in fact, was. He could recite Swinburne and Shakespeare by heart, but was also proud to say that he was a member of the last horse cavalry unit in the U.S. Army. I will always treasure the memories of sitting in his basement office, smoking cigarettes and absorbing his wisdom. He would start sentences using phrases like, "Ah, yes, I remember back in the bourbon days ...."

Since I found out about Kurth's passing, I've been pouring over over my old notes and writings from his class. One thing I had forgetten -- I used to write everything in longhand. I've found tons of old yellow legal pads. Boy, those days are way over. I've also been trying to find my old journals to use the words I wrote down back then. But those words are buried somewhere in my office here, and I suppose it doesn't really matter, because, like another old prof, Bill Goetzmann taught me, it's not about what happened, it's about what I think happened. And so here it is.

After all these years, I still can't believe how sad this makes me. The worst part for me is that Kurth was living right here in Fort Worth when he died. I wish I could have talked to him one last time to say thanks. But this will have to do.

Kurth, thanks for everything. You will be missed. To read his colleagues' rememberances, check out Bill Stott's blog.