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- Cultivating Creativity
- by Chris Tomlinson
- Our environment has always shaped our artistic undertakings. In Africa, elaborate wooden masks and sculptures come from the west, where rainforests dominate. On East Africa’s savanna, wood is a precious commodity, so the arts focus on jewelry, clothing and body modification.
In Texas, folks frequently lament a cultural …
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- American Ideas
- by Tom Palaima
- In April, William H. Goetzmann, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian at The University of Texas at Austin, told the Austin American-Statesman that as a boy his family had rented an apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota where John Dillinger had once lived. The enamel surface of the bathtub had spots eaten away by …
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- Border Teens
- by Mary Helen Specht
- The larger publishing industry is crumbling, but “young adult” fiction appears to be holding steady, even growing. As someone who as a child read novels with “adult” content years before I was supposed to, and who as an adult can frequently be found browsing the young adult section of my public …
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- Documented Immigrants
- by Emily DePrang
- Early this August, I took a Greyhound bus from Tucson to Houston and back. It was a 24-hour trip that impressed my middle-class family and friends as rugged and somewhat risky. I was proud of myself for doing it, proud, too, that I made friends with my seatmates and enjoyed chatty …
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- Hollywood, Texas
- by Josh Rosenblatt
- Robert Hinkle’s career started in earnest in the spring of 1955, when the self-described “two-bit” actor from Brownfield, Texas, got a phone call from the Famous Artists Agency asking him to sit down with George Stevens, the director of Shane, A Place in the Sun, and Gunga Din. Up to that …
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- Border Reality Defeats Gonzo Writer
- by Kirk Forrester
- In the wake of 9/11, Johnny Rico left his job as a Colorado probation officer and enlisted with the U.S. Army. Soon he was fighting in Afghanistan with the 25th Infantry Division and stealing away at night to pen his war memoir Blood That Makes the Grass Grow Green. Hailed as …
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- The Art of Destruction
- by Chris Tomlinson
- When we think of art, we think of museums, places where we preserve human creations for later generations. Not all art, though, is meant to last forever. Some artworks are designed for destruction, and a couple of Texas artists are at the forefront in modernizing this ancient, ritualistic fusion of art …
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- The Wind Delivers
- by Chris Tomlinson
- The streets of Lubbock are remarkably clean. The good people here can certainly take some credit for keeping litter at bay, but so can the wind.
More often than not, the wind blows down the brick lanes of downtown Lubbock with a gentle urgency, like a constant nudge to …
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- Going with the Flow
- by Brad Tyer
- I have something in common with Laura Bush, and it’s not narcotized adoration of George W.
John Graves’ Goodbye to a River is my favorite Texas book, too. It’s a common choice, but no less defensible for being so often chosen. I like the book for all the usual …
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- One Man’s Trash Fish ...
- by Brad Tyer
- The West Fork of the San Jacinto River was dammed to form Lake Conroe in 1973. By the early 1980s, the 20,118-acre lake was choking on hydrilla, an exotic aquatic weed originally imported to Florida for use in aquariums. From there boat trailers and dirty props flushed it into the ecosystems …
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- Jerky Boy
- by Brad Tyer
- Brad Tyer on the mythology of Texas BBQ and why jerky deserves top meat billing.
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- Alone With the Greasewood and the Sage
- by Elroy Bode
- I move along on my own two good feet down an Upper Valley road, the sun mildly shining after an early morning rain, the air a bit muggy but full of the smells of grass and weeds and wet dirt, the sound of water tumbling in a nearby canal.
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- The High Price of Loyalty
- by Josh Rosenblatt
- In burnt orange they come. The hordes.
Ninety-four-thousand, one-hundred and thirteen of them. All dressed in burnt-orange shirts with burnt-orange hats, grasping giant burnt-orange foam “No. 1” hands and burnt-orange beer holders to hold their burnt-orange beer.
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- After Ike: Same As It Ever Was
- by Jennifer Mathieu
- The night Hurricane Ike hit Houston, I was jittery and basically drunk by 7 p.m., having consumed all the Miller tallboys in our refrigerator to calm myself and prepare for the upcoming power outage (though the storm would not hit until well after nightfall). As Ike moved in, thudding and howling, …
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- Mayan Maņana
- by Melissa del Bosque
- My friends and family in Mexico speak of their country these days as if it were the victim of some cosmic ill fortune. Waves of bad news pummel the country day after day: narco-violence, kidnappings, earthquakes, a global economic crisis, and a swine flu pandemic that in April turned the world’s …
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- Injured Hearts, Injured Minds
- by Forrest Wilder
- In March, Army Spc. Michael Kern, 22, returned to Fort Hood after a year and a day in Iraq.
Shaken by his experience and disgusted with the war, Kern, a native of Riverside, Calif., tried to readjust by getting as hammered as possible. “Put it this way: For the …
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