As part of his extended Texas tour, UT professor and fiction writer Oscar Casares, who we interviewed in an earlier post, will present his second book, the novel Amigoland, at Bookpeople on August 13. Casares' debut work, a collection of carefully crafted short stories titled Brownsville, brought that Valley locale to life on the page in the same way James Joyce did for Dublin. While Amigoland isn't as geographically committed, Casares' characters are as rich and relatable as you've come to expect from this exceedingly talented author.
The very next day, Rice professor and celebrated historian Douglas Brinkley will educate Bookpeople patrons on the environmental sensibilities and conservation efforts of our "naturalist president," Theodore Roosevelt. And while the historical detailing of Teddy's eco-credentials — including the preservation of the Grand Canyon and Arizona's Petrified Forest, not to mention protecting entire species from probable extinction — is all well and good, Brinkley's true accomplishment is in the entertaining, personality-infused story he tells. Liberal media elites have had a soft spot for Teddy ever since he put a roof over our heads, but Brinkley's book will make even the least environmentally conscious among us start looking for another mountain to carve the president's face on (though let's hope they see the irony of such a gesture before they do).
The AP reports that 55-year-old David Douglas, a mechanical contractor from Cypress, Texas, has finally come out on top in Key West's annual Hemingway Days festival "Papa" Hemingway Look-Alike Contest. After previously participating in eight contests, Douglas (pictured bottom left surrounded by a gaggle of faux Hemingways) credited his long-awaited victory largely to his knitted sweater, which was inspired by Yousuf Karsh's famous 1957 portrait of Papa (bottom right). Nearly 140 rosy-cheeked, fully bearded Hemingway dopplegangers duked it out until, after several elimination rounds presided over by a panel of former contest winners, Douglas was selected over some tough competitors, including Rockport, Mass., resident Denis Golden, who apparently belted out a parody of the musical, "Hello, Dolly!"
Continuing our exhaustive literary awards coverage, UT Austin's College of Liberal Arts has announced that Michener Center graduate Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig is the 2009 recipient of the $50,000 Keene Prize for Literature. Former winners include playwright George Brant and author Will Dunlap.
Cowhig's winning play, Lidless, follows the vengeful quest of a former Guantanamo detainee to the home of his former U.S. Army interrogator 15 years later. Cowhig also received the third annual Yale Drama Series award for the play last spring.
Another $50,000 will be distributed among three other finalists: Michener Center master's candidates Malachi Black for his collection of sonnets Cantos from Insomnia; Sarah Cornwell for her short stories "Mr. Legs," "Champlain" and "Other Wolves on Other Mountains;" and Sarah Smith, a Michener graduate, was selected for her collection of poetry, Enormous Sleeping Women.
While the political impact of the Bush family has been commented on and analyzed ad nauseum, their cultural impact has gone long under-reported. Though some might say this lack of coverage is well deserved, Fort Worth's National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame would respectfully disagree. The institution is honoring former first lady Laura Bush's work to advance literacy by presenting her with the 2009 Gloria Lupton Tennison award at its annual induction ceremony luncheon Oct. 16.
The award, according to the organization's Web site, is bestowed upon an individual "who has pioneered new approaches to public service in the areas of business, law, sports, the arts or humanitarian causes." You can review Mrs. Bush's history of literary advocacy here. Former winners include former second lady/trash novelist Lynne Cheney and former ambassador to the U.K. Anne Armstrong.
In other quasi-literary Bush family news, land disputes concerning Dubya's forthcoming presidential library at SMU have officially been settled, and we're not quite sure what think about its newest exhibition.
Today is the last day to vote for NPR's Best Beach Book and our man, Robert Leleux, and his book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, is up against some literary heavyweights, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. If you're one of those who needs some convincing before you cast your vote, you can thumb through his past work at the Observeror read some glowing reviews from the Houston Press and The New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Vote now at NPR's Web site and may the best beach book — by Robert Leleux — win!
After sifting through complicated issues such as feminism, race and freedom of expression in previous books, author and UT journalism professor Robert Jensen turns his critical sensibilities — as sympathetic as they are abrasive — to the now two-millennia-old question: What does it mean to be a Christian? His newest book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, documents Jensen's struggle to articulate his own brand of theology. Considering the he spent over 40 years as an atheist, the results are nuanced and complicated.
The principles he lays out in the book are applicable to more than just a religious audience, however. Jensen analyzes and passes moral judgement on the secular philosophies at the heart of American thought, including capitalism and nationalism. Ever the contrarian, Jensen will likely ruffle feathers on both sides of any issue he addresses, but his critical examination of some basic premises makes for a bracing read as we face some of the most ecologically and economically trying times in recent history.
We talked with Jensen ahead of his rescheduled appearance at Austin's BookPeople on Wednesday, July 29. There's more information about Jensen's books and future speaking engagements on his Web site.
Texas Observer: As a disclaimer, this is the first book of yours I've read. But I would imagine that this one — considering its subject matter and some of the personal experiences you relate — would have to be especially personal. Is that the case?
Jensen: All of them are a similar style — a mix of political analysis, relevant scholarly work, and my own personal stories. In that sense this book is very much like the books I've written over the past 10 years. It was different in that I've spent virtually my whole life in distinctly secular spaces. It has been interesting to move into theological turf, partly for how religious people react, partly for how my secular, left cohort reacts, and partly just on a personal level.
You mentioned that you've spent your adult life, at least up until now, in "distinctly secular spaces." Has that been deliberate?
Yes, because the way the religion was presented to me as a kid and the way it's presented in the dominant culture is so unattractive to me that I never realized there were alternative ways to deal with that particular tradition.
There was really no sense of life or vibrancy or engagement with the world [in the church of my youth]. It was this place you were dragged to on Sunday mornings and you endured. Also, at least what I could tell of the doctrinal claims about the nature of God and the resurrection, they all seemed silly to me even as a child. It was like believing in ghosts and goblins or Greek mythology. But all of these different myth systems do have wisdom. They're all ways people have wrestled with the big questions — sometimes the unanswerable questions.
You self-identify as a Christian, but you open the book saying that you reject the conventional conception of God and the historical fact of the resurrection. Why did you decide to become a Christian then, knowing that you would reject what many consider the basic tenets of the faith? In other words, why not self-define as a Muslim or Hindu?
Personally, I was born into a family that identified as Christian, so I was raised with those stories. And to a larger degree, the last stats I saw were about 75 percent of the population identifies as a Christian, and in that sense it's a de facto Christian culture. That doesn't mean it's a Christian nation in the way right-wing conservatives want to say, but it is a Christian culture and those are my stories. Like any moral story, there is always a struggle over how to interpret and understand them, and I don't see any reason why I don't have a right to be part of that struggle. The case is strengthened for me by the degree to which religion is part of the political discourse in this country and, therefore, the definition of what it means to be a Christian has not only theological implications, but also political ramifications. And part of it is just the happenstance of meeting people in a particular congregation and a minister whom I liked.
What exactly are some of those political ramifications, in your opinion?
In general, if Christianity gets defined as a narrow, exclusive, reactionary, xenophobic faith in the way that I think fundamentalist, right-wing Christianity is defined, I think that's bad. It's bad for policy, it's bad for the world, it's bad for the country. Even if I were secular or Muslim or whatever, I think the struggle to define Christianity matters.
And on the ground level, churches are a place to connect with people politically, as well as personally and spiritually. In other words, they are a base from which one can work. One doesn't work politically as an individual, one works politically as a member of a group. This particular church — St. Andrews Presbyterian [of Austin] — as well a handful of others often do want to act politically.
Speaking of church politics, in the book you outline your struggle ito become a member of the church, which largely stemmed from a controversy surrounding a column you wrote explaining your beliefs. Somehow you retained your membership after the presbytery — the regional governing body in the Presbyterian church — voted to revoke it. How did you manage that?
That's the part I'm unsure of. I was confirmed [in my youth at] a Presbyterian church in Fargo, North Dakota, and there is something generically called the "Letter of Transfer." So I made a public profession of faith to join St. Andrew's, but I also could transfer my membership in from my former church. Now, I think what happened was that after the presbytery voted me out, the letter of transfer allowed me back in. But if the presbytery wasn't hypocritical, it would say whatever you did as an adult should trump whatever you did when you were 14 or 15 years old. That never happened, though.
This is a real troubling question for Protestant churches, though. The Catholic church, for example, has a process to excommunicate, it has a central authority. There is no Pope equivalent in the Protestant tradition. If you decide the state of your faith in a personal relationship with God — which is a key concept of the Reformation and Protestantism — that would suggest that no one can tell you whether you're a believer or not. But at the same time, if you have a church that has a membership, that means there are boundaries. If anyone can be a member, then you don't really have an organization. With their rejection of a central authority, there is a tension built in to the Protestant tradition. I was an irritant in that sense because I was raising that obvious question.
When you're worshipping at St. Andrew's on a Sunday morning, is it ever frustrating for you that in prayer or in sermon, you and the person next to you are giving reverence to completely different things: be it concepts of God, the divinity of Jesus, etc.?
For one thing, at St. Andrew's there's not a complete consensus. It's a progressive church theologically and politically. The people who worship there are there because St. Andrew's has that character. The church actually encourages people not to simply accept traditional doctrines and to work with their own conceptions of these terms. I wouldn't want to go to a Pentecostal church or a fundamentalist Baptist church for those reasons. I would feel out of place there. But with this church there is a certain kind of cohesion. Now within that there are certain disagreements, but that's healthy, I think.
Switching gears a bit, you are harshly critical of American capitalism in the book, yet you don't specifically outline a preferable economic system. What might that look like? What sort of systemic changes need to be made, in your opinion?
People often ask me, "If capitalism is so bad, well what sort of system do you want?" And I always say the same thing. I can't design, nor can anyone else, a system that you can take off the shelf to then replace capitalism with. One can articulate principles, and I think the principles of socialism — equality, justice, which are very similar to the principles of Christianity, quite frankly — can help us get from where we are to where we want to be.
You can't just impose a system. It's a country of over 300 million people. How are you going to just say, "Alright, new system: Bob's updated Christian Socialism." That's utopian. And there's no way to implement it politically without massive coercion, which undermines the principles themselves. So you articulate the principles and you experiment.
The very authoritative style of the Soviet system was unjust and unsustainable. It failed, it collapsed from the weight of its own contradictions. The same is going to happen to capitalism, it's just that capitalism is a more efficient system. This notion that capitalism is the end of history, that we've reached this final stage, is delusional. It's not that I think capitalism should be replaced, it's that it's not going to last. It's unsustainable and produces such a radically unequal distribution of wealth that it's hard to imagine human beings accepting it indefinitely.
The 2nd annual Way Out West Book Festival is scheduled for July 31 through Aug. 1 at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. Headliners include novelists Stephen Harrigan and Elizabeth Crook, photographers Laurence Parent and Wyatt McSpadden — whose latest book, Texas BBQ, was featured in a column by managing editor Brad Tyer — and Wimberley author and Observer contributor Joe Nick Patoski, who received the TCU Texas Book Award for his recent biography, Willie Nelson: An Epic Life.
Austin novelist Sarah Bird, one of the newest Dobie-Paisano fellows, will host the festival's Grand Gala Banquet Saturday night. Observer contributing writer Robert Leleux recently sized up Bird's latest novel, How Perfect Is That, here.
If you'd like more info about the festival, their Web site is available for your perusal.
Like Glen Beck before him, marine-turned-Fox-News-commentator Oliver North (whose contributions to American society have perhaps best been summed up in song) has lately been dreaming of dystopia. North, a San Antonio native, recently launched a vehicle for his doomsday musings, a publishing imprint called Fidelis Books ("fidelis" being the Latin for "faithful"). Among its first titles are Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism by U.S. Senator Jim DeMint and North's novel, After Jihad, which depicts America circa 2032 as a "poor shadow of the great nation its founders envisioned."
While we readily acknowledge the value of dystopian literature, we're not sure if North's protagonist, Peter Newman, will take his place in the canon alongside George Orwell's Winston Smith or Aldous Huxley's Bernard Marx. Then again, North's predecessors never utilized stirring promotional tools like this video featuring a cast of solemn white males suiting up to battle an enemy that "ensnares, blinds, and breathes darkness":
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While the political impact of the Bush family has been commented on and analyzed ad nauseum, their cultural impact has gone long under-reported. Though some might say this lack of coverage is well deserved, Fort Worth's 
After sifting through complicated issues such as feminism, race and freedom of expression in previous books, author and UT journalism professor Robert Jensen turns his critical sensibilities — as sympathetic as they are abrasive — to the now two-millennia-old question: What does it mean to be a Christian? His newest book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, documents Jensen's struggle to articulate his own brand of theology. Considering the he spent over 40 years as an atheist, the results are nuanced and complicated.
The 2nd annual Way Out West Book Festival is scheduled for July 31 through Aug. 1 at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. Headliners include novelists Stephen Harrigan and Elizabeth Crook, photographers Laurence Parent and Wyatt McSpadden — whose latest book, Texas BBQ, was featured in a 
