There are lots of Joe O'Connells out there. I think this one is a stand-up comedian who is also sometimes listed as Joey O'Connell. (Not to be confused with my cousin Joey whose daughter Lauren O'Connell was on Survivor!)
Once before I had to alert folks this Joe is not me. IMDB has him in my credits list for Bob Hearts Abishola, one of those formulaic TV series that seem to be from decades ago. This Joe is good friends with the show's star Billy Gardell.
I'm posting this photo so IMDB will get the hint and move him to the correct spot...
Judge's latest film stars Jason Bateman as the owner of a flavor extract company who must deal with clueless employees and a listless marriage.
The look of the factory
was inspired by the former Adam's Extract plant in Austin (the company
is now in Gonzales), but the quirky characters came from Judge's
imagination mixed with his own factory experiences.
“I
worked in a place in Albuquerque that made honor snacks” (cardboard
vending cartons stocked with candy and chips), he said. “A guy came up
to me my first day and looked at me very seriously, like he was going to
lay some wisdom on me, and said (Judge's voice deepens): ‘I started
here too as Manpower, only I did 40 crates a day. I'm full-time now.'”
A version of that odd character who takes his job way too seriously
makes it into the film, which Judge calls “the inverse of Office Space
but still about the working place.”
“I'd
always been the employee,” Judge said from a suite overlooking Lady Bird
Lake at Austin's Four Seasons Hotel, where he was meeting with the
media about the new film, which opens Friday. “When Beavis and Butt-head
happened, I went from never having anyone work for me to having 50 to
90 people at any given time working for me. When that first happens, you
want to be a nice boss. Then you get taken advantage of. You have to
find a balance there.
“I thought it would be fun to see it from the point of view of the guy who runs the place.”
This is reflected in Extract
when Bateman's character runs up against employees endlessly
complaining or — in the case of a character Judge portrays — offering
inane advice presented as wisdom.
Building a following
Judge conceived the story directly after Office Space came out in 1999, but Fox execs thought Idiocracy, which tells of a dumbed-down future where corporations rule, had more commercial potential.
Neither Office Space nor Idiocracy found big-screen audiences. Office Space instead built a following on video, selling 2.3 million copies between 1999 and 2003.
The
video success “was really sweet for me because I had to fight so hard to
get that movie the way I wanted it,” Judge said. “After all those
battles, having it not do well at the box office was kind of hard to
take. I could just hear (studio executives) all going, ‘You see? We told
you so.'”
He co-wrote Idiocracy as his last obligation to Fox. “However many years it took for Idiocracy (which was barely released in 2006) to happen, Office Space just kept growing and growing and making more money.”
In his spare time, Judge rewrote Extract with Bateman (from TV's Arrested Development) in mind to star. Judge and his producing partners on the long-running animated sitcom King of the Hill, John Altschuler and David Krinsky, decided to make Extract with private financing out of major studio clutches. Miramax later signed on for domestic distribution.
Filmed in Los Angeles
Extract
is the first of Judge's three live-action films not shot in the Austin
area, but instead in Los Angeles, a decision he said was purely
financial.
His next project, Brigadier Gerard, could well shoot in Central Texas. He will produce, not direct the movie, which is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle short story.
Judge, who grew up in Albuquerque, has called Austin home since the early '90s.
He said he enjoys
fishing on his land in nearby Elgin and going out to support musician
friends playing in Austin, a city he described as small enough to be
comfortable but with everything he needs, including ample advice from
filmmaking friends Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater.
Judge took a circuitous route to a filmmaking career. He has a physics degree from the University of California-San Diego
and worked as an engineer at a string of companies — including one in
San Diego that had him working on electronic systems for F-18 fighter
jets.
He also was a bass player touring with Dallas-based blues artists Anson Funderburgh and Doyle Bramhall. While living in Dallas, he did the first crude animations that resulted in Beavis and Butt-head, characters he doesn't rule out reviving.
“Now with Facebook, I've reconnected with a lot of people I knew in high school,” he said.
“Everybody thinks I
based Butt-head on them, or they're afraid that I did. It wasn't anybody
in particular, but I get that all the time.”
Joe O'Connell is a freelance writer living in Austin.
Writing has become a family affair for prolific East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
He's jointly penned fiction with his son Keith, his
daughter Kasey edited the new horror anthology “Impossible Monsters,”
which includes a Lansdale story, and the voice guiding the writer's
latest novel “The Thicket” is his father's.
“It's the way he told stories,” Lansdale said of his father, who was
born in 1909 and was 42 when his son was born. “He had a beautiful
voice. He couldn't read or write, but he was a masterful storyteller.”
“The Thicket” is a western set at the turn of the last century narrated by 16-year-old Jack Parker.
Lansdale said the story came to him with what is the book's first
paragraph: “I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and
my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end
up with worse things happening than had already come upon us and that
I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big
angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly
how it was.”
Lansdale doesn't plot his novels and doesn't stick to one genre. He's
known for writing horror, mystery, science fiction, even comic books.
“I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip,” he said.
“I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.”
“The Thicket” has the excitement of Lansdale's pulpier
works, but there's an underlying literary element here that marks the
author as perhaps Texas' finest contemporary writer.
The novel easily draws comparisons to Charles Portis' “True Grit,” given Parker's quest with the help of his mismatched comrades to rescue his sister from bad men.
ut, like a lot of Lansdale's work, Mark Twain lurks.
“Twain is my keystone,” he said. “He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.”
For Lansdale that means a lot of humor, violence and no flinching at tough subjects — particularly racism.
“One of the things I really despise these days in fiction
is political correctness, especially if I'm writing about the past,” he
said. “That's a way of showing you what it was like. People get upset
about certain words used. I don't use those words in my life, but people
did. And for you to think, 'If I just take that word out it'll be OK,'
well, it makes it mean that it never happened, and it did happen. It
disturbed me so much that probably 95 percent of my fiction is affected
by it. I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”
Lansdale had more Southern gothic in mind a la Flannery O'Connor
than he did Western with “The Thicket.” It's full of crisp and funny
dialogue (“That's the way I talk,” he said) and over-the-top characters
very much in the mold of his father, who could crush an apple in his
hand, bust a belt with his chest and fought at carnivals during the
Great Depression. He also was, at least on the surface, a racist.
“His racist rhetoric was about the worst I'd heard, but
he still treated people the same,” Lansdale said. “My dad was raised in
that environment, so he had that generalization. But when he dealt with
people individually he didn't feel that way. I know a lot of people who
have the right words but not the right actions. He's still my hero in
spite of that flaw. His reality and the way he proceeded with his life
is pretty much how I proceed with mine.”
The outsider is well represented in “The Thicket” by
ex-slave grave digger Eustace, and Shorty, a bounty-hunting dwarf.
Neither is anyone's fool. But there is evil lurking in this finely drawn
work as well.
The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English
and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection
“Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college
instructor for seven years before that.
Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”
“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a
different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even
changes a little.
“Odessa has a Westerness to it, a Southwesterness. People
are laconic and slow-talking. They accept things. In East Texas there's
a sense of irony. Life is tough, and there's a tough, mean God out
there.”
Sanderson's Beaumont is the land of the three P's: pine, petroleum and
Pentecostals, where the claustrophobia of the swampland and the
oppressive heat conspire to push the “Baptists behind gated communities
to avoid sin, while the Pentecostals are not afraid to testify,” he
said.
“There's an old saying that things in West Texas can kill you, but in East Texas they just make you wish you were dead.”
Both books are gritty and real with stories steered by those who are on the margins of society.
In “Nothing to Lose,” Roger Jackson
is a small-time private eye who spends most of his free time at the
Nothing to Lose bar, which is a mangled version of East Texas native Janis Joplin's famous lyric (as written by Kris Kristofferson): “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It's a theme that flows through Sanderson's work: The people who are
on the edges of society. He writes in the novel that “we didn't duck
life, as our social and financial betters did, but we were very wary of
it. We knew, eventually, life would just beat us down.”
Sanderson's fictional worlds abound with potential.
“I'm writing about the losers, the ne'er-do-wells, the people who
almost, could of, maybe done it,” he said. “I'm always attracted to
those stories, those people. It's one reason I don't like superheroes. I
don't like people who are all-powerful.”
In “Trashy Behavior,” that includes a prostitute turned
bar owner with a gripping story behind the scar that snakes across her
face. That story and a few others from the book set in the Odessa oil
boom and bust years of the late '70s and early '80s are being reworked
into another novel on the horizon.
In the '60s San Antonio-set story “Bankers,” inspired by his
part-time bank jobs while in high school and later at what was then Southwest Texas State University, Sanderson writes of a teen who is “mostly waiting on my future to find me” but is instead thrust into danger.
“In most of my stories, a character has to confront
something,” he said. The collection's strongest story may well be the
gripping Western “Comancheria,” in which a boy Sanderson describes as
being potentially autistic gets caught among the languages of his
German immigrant family, the Comanches who brutally capture him and the
English-speaking soldiers who save him. Back home in school “not only
did he not trust the Deutsch and American words ... but he distrusted
what the words meant.”
Jim Sanderson
grew up in San Antonio dreaming of escape. Today he's on the short list
of accomplished authors who most effectively evoke the city's essence.
His latest literary mystery, “Dolph's Team,” opens with a
group of middle-aged men drinking beer and telling lies at a South Side
ice house. One of them is murdered in the restroom, and the crew set
out to right the wrong with nothing but a Taser, their reading glasses, a
few beers and a lot of reminiscing about a city constantly evolving.
“There are in fact three San Antonios to me,” said Sanderson, 58, a writing professor at Lamar University
in Beaumont. “The first is the town that I remember. It is a part of
me. It is vivid, even if my memory is faulty — thus, I can remember it
like I want to. The second is the historic San Antonio. I don't mean
just the big incidents of the city, but its growth into what it is
today. The third is the nearly million-population city of today.”
“Dolph's Team,” about a group of aging friends from both sides of the
law investigating the (seemingly) cut-and-dried murder of a friend, is
the fourth Sanderson mystery. He's also an accomplished short story
writer, and many of the characters in the new novel also appear both in
his other mysteries and his most recent story collection “Faded Love.” A
recurring theme is the almosts of life, or, as
writer-turned-bug-exterminator Walter tells the reader: “the importance
of what could have happened.”
“At writers' conferences,” says Sanderson, “we talk about
how the publishing world has changed — or has died. Self-pity and
gallows humor are served at these conferences as desert. So I'm always
reminded that I'm an aging/outsider/loser. But I think that this
disenchantment is a part of growing up. I think that we all feel that
way. I just like to write about characters who really are aging
outsiders who've missed their opportunities.”
His recurring characters give his collective work a view of how lives evolve.
“I'm confirming what I first thought about fiction: It is
the best medium for dealing with time, showing the past and present
working simultaneously,” he said. “So in my stories, no matter how long
they are, I try to show that my characters have a future — in terms of
their hopes, ambitions, loves — and a past, but are stuck in the present
of the story.”
Sanderson cites as a major writing influence the late Three Rivers native James Crumley for his twisting of tried-and-true mystery conventions, and for his sense of place.
San Antonio is indeed a character in “Dolph's Team.” The character Rodney Lee,
a city councilman dreaming of being the city's first black mayor,
epitomizes the ambition of a poor boy from the East Side. Meanwhile,
Dolph, Walter and crew watched Southtown evolve into a trendy spot for
artists. Sanderson's San Antonio clearly evokes his South Side
upbringing.
“There was a mixture of ethnicities, races and income
levels,” he said. “But we were united in feeling that we were outshone
by the North Side. We weren't the cool kids. We didn't have the cool
stuff. We mocked our ethnicities and our backgrounds, but the mocking
was adolescent games. And I think that we came out of that time seeing
those problems as the source of games or humor. Thus we couldn't take
the prejudices that we grew up among seriously.”
Bret Anthony Johnston's
fiction shapes Corpus Christi into a literary character, but he has a
confession: He hates the beach. The sand itches; the salt water clings.
“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston
said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind
national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that
follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four
years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.
The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.
“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi
specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only
happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but
now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.
Stand on Ocean Drive and look at the water and tourists,
he said. Pivot to the south and you've got soldiers and sailors. Pivot
again and see farmers. One last turn and you see a downtown trying
desperately to reinvent itself.
But most of all it's the weather. The distinct, overpowering heat that
pulls you down. The threat of a distant storm that ever looms.
“I wanted the weather to in some way mirror what the family was going
through,” Johnston said. “They can't escape everything that has
happened to the family in the same way people in Corpus Christi can't
escape the heat.”
The novel drills into the fractures the kidnapping has
created in the family and how they have learned to cope. The mother
volunteers at night to keep watch on an injured dolphin. The father
turns to a lover for distraction. The younger son masters the skateboard
that his brother left behind (and that Johnston in a previous
incarnation rode in a brief professional skateboarding career). When the
missing boy returns, they must cobble together a changed life in the
aftermath of their personal storm.
“You never know when one of these storms is going to hit you,”
Johnston said of the novel's greater metaphor. “When it does, you can
tell a lot about a person by how they handle the storm. Do they put up
plywood on the windows or do they hit the road?”
“That changed my life,” Johnston said. “I left knowing this is what I
want to do — I want to tell stories. That's what I'm still trying to
do.”
He grew up in a household where reading books was the
norm, but had no notion that he could write them. In May, Johnston
returned to Corpus Christi to read in that same author series.
After degrees from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Miami University,
Johnston found himself at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop where he
completed stories that would make it into his 2004 debut collection
“Corpus Christi.”
“Remember Me Like This” can trace its seeds to Johnston's
volunteer work decades ago in Corpus Christi with an injured dolphin,
which left him with a mystery. He was told the night shift with the
dolphin was the hardest to fill, yet the shift was always taken. Then
someone brought in a beach ball for the dolphin. Over the years he
pondered who would so strongly desire to work the night shift. Then it
came to him: A mother who had lost her child. The ball belonged to that
child.
“The beach ball was full of her son's breath,” Johnston
said. “She brought it in to save the dolphin since she hadn't saved her
son.”
Six years of writing, frustration, breaks to pen short stories, more writing and rewriting later he had a novel.
“Many people say the book is about being lost; I think it's about
being found,” Johnston said. “We all want to believe the lost will find
their way home.”
While Johnston revels in the creation process, he sees writing as a vocation.
“I find writing incredibly difficult. What makes me come
back is the pleasure of the sentence,” he said. “I don't romanticize
being a writer at all. I think of writing as labor. I don't believe in
muse or inspiration. I believe in going to work. It's the same as if I
worked at the Naval Air Station. I clock in and clock out when the work is done.”
It's not easy being a 21st-century male. The silent, hardworking
breadwinning dad of the past still lurks, but his sons have to find
their way in a new world of open communication and shared
responsibility.
Author Kevin Grauke
examines this change in the 13 stories that make up his tautly written,
thoughtful debut collection, “Shadows of Men,” which recently won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for best first published book of fiction.
“The definition of masculinity has changed in the last several decades,”
said Grauke, who received a master's degree in creative writing from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University
in Philadelphia. “We have households with two incomes, households with
women earning more than men. There's a sharing of domestic duties, of
parenting duties, a flattening of gender roles. That's very good, but it
also creates stress.”
Grauke's men band together to drink beer and lament their low sperm
counts. They grapple for a sense of identity after losing their jobs.
They sometimes live with their mothers.
“It's hard to completely disengage from the myth of the
man and what that means,” Grauke said, “especially in Texas, where there
are those other layers of machismo — ranchers, cowboys. Whether you
have those in your personal family history, it's there in the culture.”
The stories are set in a Texas that reflects Grauke's childhood in
Garland. Arguably the collection's strongest piece is “The New Father,”
in which a stay-at-home dad roams his North Texas subdivision
fantasizing that behind each closed door a mother both admires and lusts
after him. He walks streets named for Texas heroes such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie,
but his world would prove alien to those icons. Then a real-life mom
recklessly speeds past his baby carriage and isn't pleased when he calls
her on it. He later plots a clumsy form of revenge, but the minor guilt
twists like a knife inside of him.
“He wants to do something that asserts the role he
relinquished when he wasn't paying attention,” Grauke said. “He has a
desire to be heroic, but there's an impotence that goes along with it.”
In “With the Snow,” a haunting story that channels Richard Ford,
a young man caught up in a world of drugs and desperation attempts to
save a girl who may or may not be in a drug coma, but he instead leaves
her behind.
“There's a continuing notion of wanting to fulfill that mythic
masculinity, that heroism,” Grauke said, “but the opportunities to do
that are limited. He almost does the heroic, but those rescuing moments
are rare. Yet we still desire them.”
Grauke leaned on an older story of masculinity in the suburbs — John Cheever's “The Housebreakers of Shady Hill” — for inspiration when he settled on the theme for his work.
“It seemed to bring the stories together to be something a little larger than they were on their own,” he said.
The author left his native Texas a decade ago, but it
clearly has not left him. He's at work on a collection of linked stories
set in small-town West Texas, the home of his parents.
“I don't think if I stayed in Texas I'd be writing about it,” Grauke
said. “There's certainly a truth to that cliché that you don't know what
you have until you no longer have it. I feel artistically connected to
Texas in a way I never did when I lived there.”
“I think of the difference between them and some coddled students,” said Leche, who now teaches at Austin Community College. “They were so appreciative to have teachers there.”
Leche spent a year teaching in Afghanistan for the University of Maryland,
which has offered college classes in the field for American soldiers
since the Vietnam War. Halfway through the experience she had a light
bulb moment when one student said, “I wish people knew what it's really
like to be a soldier.”
Thus was born “Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from
Afghanistan,” a book of essays by soldiers and their loved ones who aim
to walk us through the experience from recruitment to horror to honor.
“It struck me that I could help these students to be heard, give them
a chance to connect with the public in a visceral way about what goes
on: the good and bad, the funny and sad,” Leche said. “For a lot of
Americans, the military is an abstraction. Soldiers realize that.”
In other words, we may honor our soldiers, but do we truly understand them and their experiences?
Sgt. First Class Michael Bramlett writes of “The Great Voice,” the public address system that emits a monotone phrase: “The aerial gunnery range is now hot.”
“Do any of us really know what the hell this means?” Bramlett says in
an essay titled “B-Hut Blues.” He knows loud booms will follow while he
looks up with reverence at the 3-by-5-foot American flag on the wall
near photos of his wife and children. Yet his national pride is mixed
with sorrow. He soon learns a mortar hit a couple of B-huts away. He
tries to sleep, but cannot.
“It's beautiful and terrible to wear that uniform,” said
Leche, who when her husband's job took them to Germany in the 1990s
first volunteered to teach in war-torn Bosnia and knew she had found her
calling. “They gain a life — the military is a life — but they risk
losing their lives.”
They also face the losses involved with not being there, like in Sgt. Christopher Williams' piece “My Great Sadness,” which tells of discovering over the phone that his wife had died in her sleep so many miles away.
Perhaps most powerful is Specialist Andrew Stock
of Austin's piece, “The Hate,” a poetic meditation on the moment when a
soldier must pull the trigger. “The tragedy of war is the realization
that it would be all too easy to exterminate everything,” Stock writes.
An anonymous soldier illustrates this in “They Were Just Kids” with
the moment waving children refuse to get out of the way of the Humvee
she is in. The driver doesn't dare stop for fear it's a Taliban trap. “We roll through,” the soldier writes. “Not even a glance back.”
Leche terms it the “humble ambiguity of being human
yourself but having to forget that the enemy is human in order to kill
them. Some soldiers say they want to kill all those (enemies), but what
they really mean is I don't want to be killed by (them).”
That’s what Stephen Harrigan did while writing his latest novel “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.”
“He had little schooling, he was a great joke teller, and he was
politically ambitious,” Harrigan said of Lincoln. “I think that in his
mind, he emulated Davy Crockett. Both were these backwoods guys who went
into politics. Maybe in his mind he thought he could be that guy.”
Harrigan’s novel follows a young Lincoln finding his
political and social way in 1830s Springfield, Illinois. The future
president is sometimes gawky, inept in the ways of love, but ever
charming and driven.
It’s a time period Harrigan already mined in “The Gates of the Alamo,”
which made the project a little easier to research — he knew the big
issues of the time, the clothes, the speech.
One of those big issues was Texas. Early in the novel, the Alamo falls,
and people in Springfield are alarmed by newspaper reports of the
battle.
Later in the book, Texas’ role in the expansion of slavery comes into
play, as people debate the Texas republic’s admission to the U.S. union and the consequences of that decision — which led to the war with Mexico. Several men in the book fought in that war.
“As a novelist, a lot of my work, including ‘The Gates of
the Alamo’ and ‘Remembering Ben Clayton,’ is centered on San Antonio,”
said Harrigan, who is one of the headline authors at the San Antonio
Book Festival on April 2. “In this novel, given the time frame and the
issues of the day, I wanted to come back to San Antonio, a city that has
had such an magnetic pull on my life.”
While “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln” is fiction, and Crockett isn’t a bona
fide character in the book, his presence is based solidly in fact,
something that could be disconcerting to the longtime Texas Monthly writer, who grew up in Abilene and Corpus Christi, but has called Austin home for many years.
“There’s a sense of a thousand Lincoln scholars looking
over your shoulder,” he said of the three-year writing process for the
book. “My mind was divided between winning their respect and
entertaining the reader. I had to be authentic to history, yet have a
credible story.”
Clay Smith, the Austin-based editor-in-chief of Kirkus
Reviews and literary director of the S.A. book festival, praised
Harrigan’s “bravery” at “taking on another Lincoln book.”
“As a person who receives a lot of books and galleys, the number of
books published about Lincoln is just bizarre,” Smith said. “The beauty
of a novel about young Lincoln is you have this man who is extremely
ambitious, but also very awkward, who doesn’t know what to do with
himself at times. Stephen has captured that young man very accurately.”
Harrigan began thinking about the youthful Lincoln during a cross-country car trip a few years ago with his wife of 40 years, Sue Ellen.
Harrigan was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” and was struck by a letter Lincoln had written to Mary Owens, a Kentucky girl he courted, if it can be called that, before meeting future wife Mary Todd,
also from Kentucky. (A sample quote from Lincoln: “Nothing would make
me more miserable than to believe you miserable — nothing more happy,
than to know you were so.”)
“In the letter, he just seemed so confused and so
equivocal that I thought there’s something about this guy that we don’t
really know about,” Harrigan related. “I wanted to look beneath the
facade.”
He succeeds by creating the fictional character Cage Weatherby, the book’s title friend, a poet whom Lincoln both respects and confides in. Like Lincoln, Weatherby is also fired by ambition.
“You can’t be president if you’re not ambitious,” Harrigan said.
“It’s the thing that defined Lincoln, that kept him on his path.”
While Weatherby is a fictional character, as is Springfield doctor Ash Merritt, Harrigan weaves real characters into the story such as Lincoln pals Joshua Speed, Ned Baker, John Stuart, John Hardin and Billy Herndon,
as well as real events like the Black Hawk War of 1832. Viewed through
all these characters’ eyes, Harrigan’s Lincoln is both likeable and
perplexing.
“It’s an odd thing to do, to put words into Lincoln’s
mouth,” Harrigan said. “I can’t help myself. I want to get in the time
machine and go back there.”
It’s been said that more books have been published about
Lincoln than anyone except Jesus. So adding another title to that long
list can be a daunting proposition.
“I’ve learned not to be afraid,” Harrigan said. “I keep trying to
break out of my comfort zone. Lincoln’s is a story that’s both familiar
and dangerous. He’s a person everyone in the world has an opinion about.
It could easily go wrong.”
Indeed, while the young Lincoln presented in the novel is
full of charisma, he also shows cruelty to his political enemies,
penning scathing anonymous opinion pieces in local newspapers. He makes
some questionable calls with his friends, too.
One aspect of Lincoln that may surprise many readers is
his attitude about slavery. While the fictional Weatherby leans toward
abolition, Lincoln is stuck in the middle ground of his times.
“He had a strong moral compass,” Harrigan said. “He had
deep-set admirable qualities, but he was not an abolitionist. Slavery
was not the burning issue it would become. It tracks the people of his
time.”
As a child growing up in Fort Worth, she would travel with her family
to elderly relatives’ homes. Off to the side was a woman, always white,
who served as caretaker/nursemaid/confidante. She worked for room and
board and a tiny salary.
“The thinking was white women were qualified by race to
care for elderly white women,” Harris said in a recent interview. “There
was always some story about them that nobody would tell me. It was
often scandalous, or ultimately, just that the brother lost the farm.”
Harris’ Gival Press Novel Award-winning “Mayhem” examines
just such a fictional scandal and goes deep into how societies and
families get dysfunctional in rural 1936 Texas. It’s a world of prim,
hardworking German-immigrant farmers.
“I had to imagine a back story — how a woman came down in the world,” Harris said.
She drew from a real-life account of a ’50s fight in the small Central
Texas town Goldthwaite between two drunken locals and a couple of
soldiers that led to the partial castration of one GI.
In “Mayhem,” the stakes are raised with a presumed marital
infidelity/potential rape as the catalyst. But Harris’ narrator makes
clear what the author also wants you to know: This is not a rape story.
Indeed, it’s a larger story of family, vigilante justice and the moral expectations piled on women, in this case recent bride Evelyn Gant, in a society that is quick to assume their guilt and cast them out.
“It’s a double experience: What has happened to her and
what has been done within her hearing by her husband and his brother,”
Harris said. “She doesn’t remember the events deeply for the next 18
years.”
This German-immigrant place is key to “Mayhem.” It’s far
from the center of civilization, and the sexual freedom of the Roaring
’20s proved not a ripple in their world.
“Culture doesn’t change easily,” Harris said. “I’m
interested in the daily life of rural people — the work they do and the
rhythms that brings to life.”
Harris employs an interesting form of narration to bring her story to
life. Essentially a girl is telling the story she imagines for a
live-in caretaker much like the one Harris encountered when she was a
girl.
The narrator “writes” the story and is truthful about her
twisting of facts and fiction to suit her story. So the story, in a
sense, references itself.
It’s a trick, but one that works for this story because
Harris is after something larger — that sociological layer of choices we
make to coexist.
Consider that main character Evelyn, who a few years down
the road could easily vamoose to San Antonio and work in the WWII
industry for higher pay and anonymity, chooses instead to stay put where
she is known as a pariah.
“There’s a certain conservatism where it’s important to know the
people you have always known,” Harris said. “She is her family, her
ancestors and all of her connections.”
It’s a first published novel for Harris, whose story
collection “The Ant Generator” won the prestigious John Simmons Prize
and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1991.
But she’s been a regular writer since seeing a film years
ago about time management. The message: “Decide what is really
important in your life and do that first every day.”
“Mayhem” is set her parents’ era — they were married in 1936, the year of the book’s scandalous incident.
“I’m trying to see through the eyes of the past,” she said. “I’m
drawn to write historically about subjects that seem alive to me in the
present. Like gender, or trying to tell truths — slippery as they are —
about the family past.”
Novelist Trow calls on her Huntsville experience for fiction debut
Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News
Lisa Trow was teaching creative writing to Huntsville prison inmates when she noticed the obsession lurking behind some of their work.
The men would pen love poems to female attorneys or medical professionals whom they’d barely met.
“They’d fixate on these women as symbols of hope for the future,” she
recalled in a recent interview. “It was all unrequited. It was just a
distraction they would indulge in.”
That obsession is at the heart of Trow’s debut novel “Sign of Redemption,” in which accountant Richie Harrison is wrongly accused of armed robbery and finds himself behind bars.
His sign-language skills enable him to interpret a conversation between a deaf inmate and attorney Elizabeth McKenna.
Harrison’s growing obsession with her sparks his prison escape and
escalates into violence as he tracks McKenna down in Austin and
eventually kidnaps her.
As a reporter covering death row for the Huntsville Item (she also
had two stints as the paper’s managing editor), Trow came to the story
with first-hand experience.
“A capitol murderer fixated on me,” she said. “I had to
ask the warden to ask him to stop writing me. It wasn’t flattering at
all. It was gross and creepy.”
Harrison’s obsession is more nuanced and decidedly more human, mainly
because Trow decides to have him narrate the tale as a man drifting
near the point of no return.
Trow writes in Harrison’s voice: “When I first got sent
down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the
bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a
bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs
buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all
it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long
before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in
gurgling rushes.
Behind bars, Harrison realizes that “there was some
mysterious force that took over in these tragedies and became both
writer and director to a cast of helpless actors.”
“If your narrator is a prisoner, he’s going to be
unreliable,” Trow explained. “You could go into prison rational, but the
experience of prison would corrupt you. It’s a bizarro world. Everyone
assumes you’re worthless and up to no good. You are surrounded by people
you have to be afraid of. To survive you have to learn to lie and you
must act to protect yourself.”
“Sign of Redemption” was 20 years in the writing, morphing at one point into a Quentin Tarantino-esque screenplay.
It took so long, in part, because most of that time, Trow was a single parent working full time.
But she rejected efforts to buy her story idea and
instead tried to teach herself to write a novel. She got stuck, and the
partially completed book languished for years.
“Those urges to create don’t go away,” she said. “I felt I
was letting the story beat me. Because it was now or never, I started
to work again.”
he result is a nuanced, well-crafted tale that brings together both
Trow’s journalistic skills of observation and her creative skills honed
while earning a master’s degree in writing poetry.
“You have many, many more crayons writing fiction than
journalism,” she said. “But there are things to borrow from journalism,
like the use of dialogue. Somebody said that if you cross poetry and
journalism you create novelists.”
Prison was a natural subject matter for Trow, whose first days as a Sam Houston State University
student were marred by the 1974 Carrasco prison siege in which inmates
took prison workers hostage. She heard the gunfire from her dorm room.
Meeting poet Grady Hillman
and assisting him with his 1983 documentary film “Lions, Parakeets and
Other Prisoners” led Trow to teaching writing in prison, where she once
experienced a lockdown.
“The prison SWAT team came through,” she said. “You could hear the thunder of boots from the team, then hear them recede.”
And Trow had the personal heartache of marrying a seemingly reformed ex-con who later went back to his old ways.
Richie is not based on her ex-husband, she said, but
through the relationship, she did get access to unfiltered information
about real prison life.
In the end, the novel aims a spotlight at a corner of humanity we often ignore.
“I had this romantic idea of making the ordinary beautiful while also
trying to make ugly things lyrical,” Trow said. “Those two notions are
what drive me to tell stories the way I tell them.”
Historian Karl Jacoby was driving near the Texas-Mexico border when he was stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol, the agency charged with keeping Mexicans out of the United States.
He explained, to their dismay, that he was writing a book about a Texan who had tried desperately to cross into Mexico.
In the completed book, “The Strange Career of William
Ellis,” Jacoby has pieced together of the life a former slave who
transformed himself into a wealthy Mexican.
Ellis was born to a mixed-race mother on a cotton
plantation in Victoria one year before slavery ended, but found
transformation in San Antonio, then the hub of commerce between the
United States and Mexico.
“He was born ‘in between’ in multiple ways,” Jacoby said. “There was
this fault line between slavery and freedom and what that might mean.
There was also a fault line between the United States and Mexico.”
Both nations were courting immigrants as business boomed in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century.
“Victoria was the outer fringe,where the Mexican ranching frontier
and United States cotton culture met,” Jacoby said. “San Antonio was the
hub of transport across the border to Monterrey. Then the trains came
and opened it up, and everything exploded.”
Ellis had a knack for language and soon served as an interpreter while working in the leather and wool trade.
“It’s remarkable — the boldness of what he did,” Jacoby said. “It’s
easy to locate in historical records — he took out a full page ad in the
city directory. He flipped the script. Instead of being a worker in
someone’s store, all of a sudden he was running a large concern and
doing it quite publicly.”
The newly renamed Guillermo Eliseo set up shop in the center of downtown commerce — Military Plaza.
“He wasn’t hiding on the outskirts,” Jacoby said. “He was out in the open.”
That was important to Ellis/Eliseo’s success, said the author, who teaches at Columbia University.
Slaves from Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico had been escaping in large numbers across the border to Mexico.
After being granted their freedom, African-Americans were quickly mired in Jim Crow laws that largely nullified it.
“Ellis was code-shifting,” Jacoby said. “While ‘passing’
is to completely surrender yourself to a new identity, he was
strategically moving back and forth. He would rupture the stereotype of
the African-American and play on the stereotype of the Mexican, so he
could make his way in this world.”
Ellis’ brother-in-law was the only African-American
physician in San Antonio at the time and lived just a few blocks from
Ellis, but in the city directory a C next to the doctor’s name signified
him as “colored.” In a San Antonio that was then a third Tejano, no
such C appeared initially by Ellis/Eliseo’s name.
Ellis kept one foot in his African-American past through heavy involvement in the largely black Republican Party, but it proved his undoing, Jacoby said.
When the dots were finally connected between the freed
slave and the Mexican businessman, Ellis vanished, only to reappear in
New York City as an even more flamboyant Mexican businessman, this time
on Wall Street.
The book plays on the trickster of African-American fiction, Jacoby said.
“The trickster is a character who simultaneously creates
order and disorder,” Jacoby said. “In doing so, the trickster shows you
where the boundaries are. Ellis was able to transgress every boundary
U.S. culture tried to place on him.”
His dual life also reflected the differing views on race in the
United States, where a single drop of African-American blood classified a
person as black, and Mexico, where the mixed race Mestizo was revered,
Jacoby said. Despite its own history of slavery, Mexico disavowed the
concept long before the United States.
“It all underscores how basically fictional race is,” Jacoby said.
The book presents Ellis as a dreamer/schemer whose big plans proved as much fantasy as fact.
Jacoby’s initial interest in Ellis was sparked as a
graduate student when he read of a plan Ellis organized to bring freed
U.S. slaves to Mexico as sharecroppers. The plan eventually failed.
Ellis did have some success with controlling water companies in New
York, but his far-flung adventures also included business failures, near
misses and intrigue. His early trade negotiations with Ethiopia even
brought him under suspicion of a murder that Jacoby gives little
credence.
“You could never have made this story up,” Jacoby said of
Ellis’s life. “What I love about history is its capacity to surprise
me. When you can grasp the unexpected, it makes you reconsider your
conceptions of the past.”
Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News March 21, 2014
Rolondo Hinojosa-Smith. Photo by Joe O'Connell
AUSTIN — Rolando Hinojosa-Smith chose to set his fictionalized Texas-Mexico border world in Klail City because there is no k in the Spanish language.
“It shows the Anglo side — the people who have taken over the land,” he said.
The first volume of the “Klail City Death Trip” series
appeared in the '70s. Hinojosa-Smith is now at work on the 16th and what
he expects to be the final series book. The novels and their world
recently garnered him the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof
Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I was speechless,” he said of the call informing him of the award.
In late April, Houston's Arte Público Press
will republish — in a never-available bilingual edition — his classic
early '70s novel “The Valley/Estampas del valle,” the first in the Klail
City cycle, which won a national Chicano literature award, Premio
Quinto Sol, in 1972. Four years later, he won the highest award for the
novel in Latin America, the Premio Casas de las Americas.
Hinojosa-Smith's work has been compared to William Faulkner's
and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He humbly
dismisses that, yet he often quotes Faulkner to his creative writing
students at the University of Texas at Austin:
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and
see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice
and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's
good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
Born in 1929, Hinojosa-Smith wrote his first story — in
Spanish — at 16 while spending a World War II summer with family in the
small Mexican town Arteaga. The tale was about farm workers who come
home and are pressed into military service. He lost the manuscript, then
his mother found it and he lost it again, but it set a tone for what
would come.
He is anonymous on the bus he rides to the University of
Texas with book in hand and his mind often on the next story. By 7 a.m.
each weekday he arrives at the same small office in UT's Parlin Hall
he has occupied for more than 30 years. Colorful paper flowers decorate
the wall — his daughter put them up two decades ago when she was an
undergrad at the school.
Parlin Hall's bluish tile walls evoke its 1954 opening, which came after Hinojosa-Smith's own UT days as a member of the elite Tejas Club.
He attended on the G.I. Bill after Army service spent largely in Puerto
Rico as a military newspaper reporter and an Armed Forces Radio
announcer called Rocky the Disc Jockey.
The UT campus was a big leap for a boy from Mercedes in the Rio
Grande Valley, the model for Klail City, which resides in Belken County —
meant as a stand-in for four border counties combined.
But his childhood home was filled with books. His Anglo
mother was a teacher like her mother before her. His father had fought
in the Mexican Revolution and loved to tell stories. The house was
filled with a constant flow of Spanish and English. Four of the five
children — Rolando was the baby — became teachers. His first creative
works saw print in a high school publication called Creative Bits.
That mixed heritage imbues richness to the “Klail City
Death Trap” series, which has Mexican-American and Anglo kids in
conflict, and Mexican and Anglo politicians melding into one breed.
“There are fools on both sides of the fence,” he said.
Hinojosa-Smith figures he's got a few more years in the classroom,
but he has no plans to stop writing. He used to write in longhand, with
only his first novel composed in Spanish. These days he uses a computer,
typing in English and later translating his own work to Spanish.
He travels home frequently and recently gave the convocation at his alma mater, Mercedes High School.
He told students of how their town contributed to World War II, with 16
boys lost in the war and another 16 gone later from wounds they
suffered.
It's the story of the Rio Grande Valley that has sustained him, fascinated him as a writer for decades.
“Sure, I'll keep writing,” he said. “I'd like to write something else than the series.”
His writing advice? “Don't fall in love with your writing. If it's good, you'll know.”
Talk about a lost generation. At 34, I'm in a bracket the pop culture
moguls forgot to define. I'm a baby boomer, you say? Technically, since I
was born before that arbitrary cutoff line of 1964. But isn't that a
group of '60s radicals who grew their hair long, popularized
bell-bottoms and listened to the Beatles?
Sorry, the '60s opened with me
in diapers and ended with me transformed into an avid collector of
Monkees bubble gum cards. Sure, I listened to the Beatles. My sisters
and I turned the transistor radio up loud and rocked until nap time.
Groovy. As for protests, the closest I came was the third-grade play. My
dead-on impersonation of President Lyndon Johnson got me the role of a
lifetime: the commander-in-chief who died of air pollution. Ah-choo.
A
member of Generation X? Those born in 1961 and later? I think not,
dude. Douglas Copeland, the author who popularized this most annoying of
terms, might be about my age, but just mentioning a transistor radio
should disqualify me. That and not having a tatoo or a pierced nipple.
And Xers did the unforgivable by glorifying the '60s, Boy George and
disco (though they had to dub it "trash disco" to qualify it as kitsch).
My recent experience with a member of the angst-ridden group of
twentysomethings should close the case. Here's the scene: I had a need
only she could fill. Thirty minutes after phoning her, she knocked on my
door. I welcomed her supple frame into my humble abode. God, she
smelled spicy. Her eyes lit up as she spied the high-tech electronic
gear in my living room. It was clear I had her attention. I waited for
the adoration to flow from her lips. "A turntable?" she squeaked. "You
have records? Cool. I've read about those." I was afraid she might
report me to the MTV police, so I quickly ended our discussion. I gave
her cash, took the pizza from her nubile hands and drowned my sorrow in
pepperoni.
So, if I'm not a Boomer and not a Buster, what I am?
This is the question that perplexes those of us caught in that hazy line
between two generations of bell-bottoms wearers. Oh, we hide it well.
Those of us who made it into corporate America with only nicks and
bruises claim to be cash-hungry baby boomers and try to look
enthusiastic when those Woodstock and Vietnam tales come up again and
again ("Charlie let off a blast that tore my sergeant's head off. We
just loaded up the bong again and grooved").
The hazy-liners who got
caught in the crunch of tough economic times - recent studies show that
all of the boomers EXCEPT those on the tail end of the generation are
doing just fine financially, thank you - have learned to love grunge and
have tried to hide the fact that those trendy flannel shirts we're
wearing have been in the backs of our closets (where the button-downs
are now) since high school. We pretend to welcome the disco revival and
don't admit we only tolerated it the first time to get laid.
We've
been living a lie, and it's time to come clean. We're not baby boomers
and we're not Generation X. To both of you we have this to say: Jim
Morrison bores us. We refuse to wear Birkenstock sandals. Eating a
hamburger and fries occasionally is not a mortal sin. Your two
generations combined gave us political correctness and Neil Young. Take
it all; we're fed up.
My generation's problem is a lack of
definition. We contain traits from both of our better-publicized
cousins, but we are different. If music defines a generation, then call
us the Wavers or the Punks. We came of age in the late '70s and early
'80s listening to the Sex Pistols, Devo, Talking Heads, the B-52's,
Elvis Costello, the Ramones, etc. Austin Punks still long for the days
when the Huns, the Standing Waves and the Skunks drove us to a pogoing
frenzy at Raul's and Club Foot. We took from our era's music an
attitude, a swagger that said "authority sucks, but just a little."
The
Kennedy assassination (sorry, I don't remember where I was then;
probably getting potty-trained) defined the boomer youth; Xers'
adolescence was indelibly marked by Reagan's colon surgery. Punks were
weaned on Nixon and Watergate. Think about it.
Punks were
sexually promiscuous before AIDS hit, then we calmed down and kept our
mouths shut. We have no problem with the concept of making money, after
all, most of us voted for Reagan (we were drunk at the time). But we
want more meaning from life than a 40-hour-a-week grind can provide. We
waited, and some still are waiting, to get married out of fear of
repeating our parents' failures. We are artists and stock brokers. We're
probably a lot more liberal or a little more conservative than you
imagine us.
Who are the Punks? Woody Harrelson is a prime
example. He made a career out of playing a dumb guy on Cheers, but it
was all an act. George Stephanopoulos is a Punk, but you already knew
that. Remember the Brat Pack: Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally
Sheedy? Punks one and all. Jerry Seinfeld is stretching the age limit,
but his television show is 100 percent Punk: It's all about nothing.
Ditto for Ellen DeGeneres. In fact, television in general is Punk,
everything except The Brady Bunch, which the Generation Xers have stolen
from us and turned into pop art.
Michael Jordan and Carl Lewis
are the Punks of sports, but don't tell them I told you. Spike Lee
brought our preteen years to the big screen in Crooklyn, and Austinite
Richard Linklater glorified our late '70s high school days in Dazed and
Confused, but Pulp Fiction's Quentin Tarantino is the Punk who really
understands the way we talk and think.
Suddenly we're everywhere,
and it is time for the Punks of the world to stand up and be counted.
We demand a voice equal to that of the boardroom boomers and the bored
Xers. It is time for a publicity campaign to define a generation that
can hum the theme song to Room 222 and still worships the Frito Bandito.
Soon every magazine and newspaper you read will be brimming with the
trials and defining moments of our unique generation. It'll be enough to
make you sick.
JoeO'Connell, a graduate student at SWT teaching freshman English, still thinks Pong was a cool video game.
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
