book/daddy

The last few weeks -- well, actually, it was quite a few weeks ago now,considering book/daddy's general summer-bred lethargy and all the pleasant distractions of working late hours at the office -- book blogs were ablaze with speculation and comments on the Kindle,Amazon's supposedly revolutionary digital book device. This was odd,considering the unpleasant little thing was released back in November 2007. It seems that the online flurry was mostly in response to the report in TechCrunch that despite Amazon's secrecy, they'd figured out that the company had sold 240,000 'units' and could sell as many as 750,000 in the next year. Set to be the "Tickle Me Elmo" of this Christmas, it would appear.

Leaping into the fray, book/daddy went back to reading books and sleeping late. But the damned discussion kept popping up.

So, here goes. When book/daddy has spoken to book clubs or other literary gatherings the past 5-6 years, he has often asked -- as an experiment in tracking the oncoming digital zeitgeist -- how many here have ever read a full-length novel on an electronic device? Any device, desktop, laptop, e-book reader, GPS, cellphone, hair curler, doesn't matter. But it has to involve reading a full-length novel, not just consulting a reference work. Novel readers tend to be compulsive. So adopting a digital device to feed their habit means, for them, a fundamental change. A fairly big deal. They're not just picking up a lemon peeler at Ikea and saying, isn't this cute, using it once and then losing it for good amid the dusty, boiled-egg slicers and wine stoppers cluttering up the back of a drawer somewhere.

Only once did someone ever raise his hand. All other times -- zero. Not a soul. But then last year, book/daddy posed the question to a crowd at the Texas Book Festival in Austin.

book/daddy has been on the road the past week or so -- delivering his daughter to college in Ohio. 

The neon Pegasus has been a  traditional symbol for Dallas because it graces the top of the Magnolia Building, at one time the tallest skyscraper in town, and could be seen for miles. If it looks familiar, that's because it became a trademark of Mobil Oil. Mobil Oil started as the Magnolia Oil Company. This means that a favorite symbol for Dallas is an oil company corporate logo. Image from www.3baylor.edu.

Harvey Graff's new book, The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City, is a thorough and devastating examination of how Dallas developed its larger-than-life image, its aggressive business culture, its ambitions, its conformity and fearfulness - and, especially, its malign neglect of the past.

A history and English professor at Ohio State University, Graff lived here for more than 20 years, teaching at the University of Texas at Dallas and eventually teaching a class on Dallas' history. In doing so, he discovered how ignorant his students were about Big D. The bus tour of the city that his class would take often was the first time many of his mostly suburban students had ever visited downtown.

Why should they? And why should anyone care about Dallas' past? As many newcomers to Dallas eventually learn (especially if they've asked to see any building older than 30 years), this is the city without history. It's a popular idea about Dallas' origins: This is the city with no reason to exist here -- there are no natural attractions, no mountains, no real lakes, and the Trinity River is not navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, ergo, it's not good for trade.

Actually, there were perfectly practical reasons to build a city here in the 19th century. Dallas stood on trade routes and was surrounded by great land for cattle, wheat and cotton (and later, oil). That's how the city first sold itself to people headed west. It was only when hard times hit in the '20s and '30s and the Dallas labor market began turning to unions that the city began inventing the myths about our lack of history and natural resources.

Why? Because if there was nothing here, then our city leaders and businessmen must have been true visionaries, building all this from scratch. We peasants owe them everything. And if there's no historical significance to anything, everything is up for grabs: Anything can be bought, bulldozed and redeveloped. Dallas is constantly reinventing itself like this in the hopes that the next big project will change everything (while fearing that it won't). Simultaneously, it's constantly trying to bury the past - such as its history of political extremism and racial violence.