Back of the Book

After these crazy maps showing America’s speech patterns went viral over the past week, it seems like everyone’s talking about accents and dialects. The maps were designed by a grad student in statistics and eventually found their way to the news website Business Insider, where they generated 17 million page views from folks eager to know who exactly says “y’all” and calls soda “pop.”

It’s safe to assume a fair number of those views came from Texas, where pride in our infamous drawl and twang is part of the state’s identity. But is Texas losing its unique ways of speaking? According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, slowly but surely. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that only about a third of the native Texans they interviewed used the distinctive vowel combinations that characterize Texas accents, down from almost 80 percent in the 1980s.

You can find some great audio examples of people talking Texan at the mother of all pop linguistics websites, started in 2010 by a hobbyist named Rick Aschmann. Click Texas on the map and you’ll be taken to a treasure trove of video links to famous Texans exercising their native tongue.

Researchers claim the erosion of specifically Texan speech is a result of the ever-broadening influence of pop culture, urbanization, and the influx of new residents from other parts of the country. They note that the decline is most prevalent among younger Texans.

A posible corrective to the disappearance of native speech—the state’s distinctive sayings, if not its accents—is the April publication of Texas Sayings & Folklore (Bright Sky Press), by Mavis Parrott Kelsey, Sr.

Feel free to add your favorite Texasism in the comments.

New Yorker writer George Packer has penned a complex but cohesive portrait of American decline in The Unwinding, Anis Shivani writes in the Observer‘s June issue.

Developers connive with local government—both aided by Wall Street sharks eager to securitize lousy mortgages in pursuit of out-sized profits—to bring middle-class investors to their knees. This tale has been oft-told, but Packer’s skill in deploying novelistic depth of characterization makes the connections between high and low—normally segregated classes—all too apparent.

Within Packer’s sweeping survey of American ills, it’s his skill at connecting the dots between seemingly disparate characters and events that makes Packer’s work so compelling, Shivani suggests. Read the whole review here.

The Dallas Morning News also gave The Unwinding a favorable review, calling it “long-form journalism at its best.”

And while having your book described as “a painful thing to read” by The New York Times is often not a good thing, in this case reviewer Dwight Garner is describing his visceral reaction to the book’s power. Garner says The Unwinding “hums—with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion…”

The Boston Globe is somewhat less impressed, calling the book “compelling at times,” but pegging it as perhaps Packer’s “worst non-fiction book” due to its fragmented reliance on stories already familiar to many readers.

San Antonio Poet Laureate and Chicana author Carmen Tafolla’s work often explores the intersections of identity, culture and language, mixing Spanish with English and blurring academic knowledge and street wisdom.

It’s only fitting, then, that an innovative new website dedicated to sharing Tafolla’s poetry would employ multiple avenues and voices to help readers explore her words. The site features video performances of seven of Tafolla’s poems along with reading guides, writing prompts for students, discussion of her work by noted academics, a biographical documentary on Tafolla, and other contextual information.

“My idea was to create a video, web-based resource where you can see Carmen perform the poetry, because she’s such a great performer,” says Bryce Milligan, publisher of Wings Press, who co-produced the site with San Antonio’s Public Studio collaborative.

The site kicks off with a greeting from Mayor Julian Castro, who praises Tafolla’s work as an ambassador for San Antonio, its arts scene, and for poetry in general.

“San Antonio is seeking to become a world-class creative community,” Castro says in the introduction, “and Carmen has been a wonderful part of that journey.”

Cities don’t usually name poet laureates, but that may be changing. San Antonio named Tafolla its first such in 2012, and both Houston and McAllen named inaugural poet laureates—Gwendolyn Zepeda and Olga Valle-Herr, respectively—this year.

It’s a role Tafolla, a San Antonio native, takes seriously. She’s booking public performances, community meetings and events to promote the link between poetry and literacy. She’s active in San Antonio as well as reading her work around the world, including a recent performance in France.

With the website, Milligan hopes more people will be able to discover Tafallo’s work, which he says represents San Antonio perfectly. “She’s imminently honest,” he says. “She took that language of the streets and consciously used it as an art form. That makes her a great voice for the people of San Antonio.”

Philipp Meyer, whose story “You Are Right Here” appeared in the Observer’s 2011 books issue, is on a roll lately. His second novel, The Son, is garnering rave reviews, with the Daily Beast going so far as to call it “the next great western.” He’s coming back to Austin—where he graduated from UT’s Michener Center—to read at Book People on Thursday at 7 PM.

The Son—Part II of a planned trilogy that began with 2009′s American Rust—spans the 20th century in surveying the fortunes of a Texas oil and cattle family. It’s a tale of abduction, survival, power, and race shot through with the complexities Meyer has proven so adept at teasing out of his characters.

Look for a full review of The Son in the July issue of the Observer.

Alfredo Corchado, Mexico City bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News, will be at Austin’s Book People on Wednesday at 7 PM to discuss his new book Midnight in Mexico. Debbie Nathan reviews the book in the Observer’s June issue, admiring how Corchado goes beyond the usual blood and gore suffusing books chronicling Mexico’s drug war.

While there’s plenty of violence in Midnight, which starts with a death threat against Corchado, the book’s real hook is the author’s exploration of his relationship with his native country. His reporting on Mexico’s complex and treacherous networks of cartels and corruption give the book authority, but Corchado’s intimate narrative provides a deeply personal context.

Other reviewers have also been impressed. The Washington Post called the book “electrifying,” noting its skillful parsing of the relationship between the United States and Mexico. The Austin American-Statesman and Dallas Morning News have published similarly enthusiastic reviews, and Texas Monthly has an interview with Corchado you can find here.