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book/daddy can understand why reviewers have been relatively dismissive of Larry McMurtry's new memoir, Books. But I enjoyed it more than they did. A little, anyway.

Books is actually a collection of bibliophillic recollections, some as brief as a few paragraphs, all of them tied, however loosely, to McMurtry's own life or to the books that have passed directly through his hands or through his store, Booked Up. Founded in Washington, D.C in 1971, Booked Up currently takes up five storefronts in Archer City, his tiny hometown  northwest of Fort Worth.

The antiquarian book trade, which McMurtry has followed almost as long as he's been a screenwriter, has actually produced a fair amount of volumes about itself. And they're not all just reference works. Currently, there's a series of antiquarian murder mysteries; hardly the first ones, as McMurtry points out.

But as the author also declares, when it comes to bookshop-based books, probably only 84, Charing Cross Road has ever appealed to a wide audience.

In this, McMurtry neglects The Bookseller of Kabul, an international bestseller. Still, his larger point remains: The second-hand bookshop has hardly fired up the public's imagination as a literary setting. It's a double cause for concern here. In Books, McMurtry repeatedly mulls over his immediate problem: How can his own wistful biblio-homage, the book that the reader is holding, interest anyone not already a confirmed collector? But more worrisomely, will anyone care about a dwindling profession? Will bookselling even survive? Our web-enabled world seems intent on dispensing with, if not reading and writing outright, then certainly the entire publishing industry, right down to the lowly book scout.

UNT's Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism -- which presents the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference (opening this year on July 18) -- now has a glossy annual journal, called Mayborn: Where Real Stories Come Alive. The first issue, Summer 2008, has just been released and put up online. (FYI: The school is "the Mayborn," but the magazine is, simply, Mayborn. This is for any journalists or copy editors out there.)

The inaugural issue is akin to a print version of the Literary Conference, or perhaps an advertisement for it: There's a Q&A with author N. Scott Momaday, the keynote speaker for this year's conference, a feature by Bob Shacochis (and a profile of him), author of Domesticity, who is also coming this year, plus a profile of Bill Marvel, the former features writer for The Dallas Morning News, who has been a regular at the Mayborn (and a former co-worker of mine) -- and so on.

Actually, it's more accurate to say the magazine generally resembles the conference in the ways the articles follow the many different tributaries of long-form narrative journalism that conference honcho George Getschow often features in panels and speakers: adventure journalism, for instance (Nick Heil's story about writing Dark Summit, his book on Everest climbers), biography (Andrew Rogers on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan), memoir (journalist Ken Wells on his colorful, yarn-spinning, bayou background) or professional advice (Susannah Charleson on how her experiences as a pilot and a search-and-rescue responder inform her writing, Dallas literary agent James Donovan on why most manuscripts never get published, and deservedly so).

Editor-in-chief Cathy Booth Thomas (a self-described Time magazine refugee) seems to be pitching Mayborn to both would-be narrative journalists (students, beginning writers) and to the wider market of literary-savvy readers who'd recognize a name like Momaday. And in fact, the annual is a half-professional, half-student production. My only suggestion for improvement: The general layout and design tend to look dowdy -- partly that's in comparison to the writing, which is often authoritative and polished. Well worth picking up to take a look.

Scott McLemee makes the excellent point in his post on Critical Mass  that political blogger Jon Swift should be considered one of our country's most incisive book reviewers, even if the solons at Amazon.com have squelched some of his contributions to their fine intellectual journal. Or rather, perhaps he should be considered an excellent reviewer because of their deletions.

At any rate, in the tradition of scrupulous honesty that characterizes all book blogging, Mr. Swift begins each review with the confidence-inspiring declaration that "I have not actually read this book, but ...." and then proceeds to make such trenchant observations as the following about Ana Marie Cox's Dog Days: "Most people nowadays write non-fiction books with bits of fiction secretly interspersed throughout, sort of like Where's Waldo for adults. But Ms. Cox has brilliantly turned this idea on its head and written a fiction book with bits of non-fiction secretly inserted into the text. I wonder if Oprah knows about this unique innovation."

Or this, about Ben Shapiro's Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future: "I don't plan to read a book that is basically pornography. I must confess that when I was a teenager we used to look at books like this, which claimed to condemn pornography and various perversions, but went into very explicit detail about them. We would mark the dirty parts and pass them around."

Mr. Swift proudly points out that, contra Amazon, his work has inspired serious comment, notably a spectacularly self-defeating whine/rant by Michael Fumento, author of Fat of the Land, and an admiring citation by the Uncyclopedia.

It's here that book/daddy took special interest --

The last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

As for me, they will pry my semi-colon from my cold, dead typeface.

My very funny friend, author Sarah Bird, will be reading from her new comic novel, How Perfect Is That, tomorrow evening at the Borders at Preston and Royal in Dallas -- as you may have read in the Dallas Morning News this morning. You may also know Sarah from her  humor column in Texas Monthly -- she was the writer the magazine turned to when Kinky Friedman decided to channel his jokes into a failed-but-amusing (or even failed-because-amusing) run for governor. (Sarah now trades off the chuckle duties every other month with the Kinkster.)

But me, I know a different Sarah, one I remember with great fondness and, perhaps, even a nostalgic tear. Yes, yes, indeed, I know a Sarah hidden from the public, a passionate Sarah -- Sarah on an afternoon long ago, when son Gabriel was just a tyke, asleep in his room, and Sarah and I -- modesty commands I say only that we "churned up the water" in the children's wading pool in her backyard.

Unfortunately, that backyard is located halfway up a limestone bluff in the hills northwest of Austin -- they don't call Sarah's street Wheezing Mountain Climb for nothing -- and well, husband George, sadly familiar with Sarah's athletically amorous antics, had, quite deliberately, failed to anchor the pool in any real fashion that morning before he left for work in the Texas State Department of Measuring Something Vague. So our passionate sloshing around (we were younger and more vigorous then) caused it and its heated-up contents to slide over a 40-foot drop. The sudden downpour, the floating rubber toys flying about, the Official Mighty Morphin Power Ranger Wading Pool bouncing down the hillside like a loose hubcap along a freeway and our wet, pink skins stroboscopically flashing through the branches and leaves startled a number of coyotes, deer and grackles, not to mention two members of a lawn maintenance crew and Sarah's exuberantly incontinent Yorkie, Tinkle.

Many years -- too many years -- later,

It seems Fafblog is back after a two-year hiatus (see below). And the marvelously droll Jon Swift has returned after several months of non-postings ("I started this modest blog more than two years ago for the same reason everyone starts a blog: to become fabulously wealthy"). He even apologized despite, he said, the longstanding conservative tradition against admitting anything.

Now Scott McLemee has returned after many desultory posts and has written a follow-up explanation of his lack of productivity, assuring we happy few, we loyal band of hypocrite lecteurs, that he actually didn't need cheering up, thanks much, because, you see, his new post was about how his midlife crisis (or as book/daddy prefers to think of it, "the expense of spirit in a waste of online blogging") had already passed, more or less, so no need for the sympathy cards. (A new Hallmark line -- the "ROFL Series" -- that book/daddy has already pitched: "Sorry your blogging is sagging" (open card) "But you never were any good anwyay, get off the internets, I pwn you, you miseralbe accuse for a ciritc.")

Sooo ... the fact that book/daddy is welcoming back these prodigal bloggers with happy expressions a week or two late should indicate his own persistently low blood sugar level, blogging-wise. Ah, yes, book/daddy recalls very well back when he was a young book blogger, full of piss and vinegar (a cocktail, he has always thought, not likely to induce any later fits of nostalgic reflection -- just simply fits). Ah, when he used to crank out a Monday literary round-up after midnight on Sunday -- that was, what? Less than a year ago? An eternity in blogtime. It's a cold, ruthless, speedy little goddess, this digital muse.

Essentially, I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my desire to write about books. book/daddy can barely even read about them. And mostly, the books that book/daddy has been reading haven't been worth blogging about. A decent thriller here, a good history that's already old news over there.

But hey, in the past three weeks, book/daddy put up a new wooden gate on his driveway, tiled the kitchen and graduated a daughter. In the midst of all that work, it struck book/daddy how little he missed all the "keeping up" -- what did so-and-so write about such-and-such? Everything that happened online had so little, so incredibly little relevance, to a delightful dinner with friends and family.

Large parts of life really do exist elsewhere, it seems. In our case, that elsewhere was Hector's on Henderson. Highly recommended.

The new Berkeley Bionics exoskeleton has an acronym that actually suits the NEXT Marvel superhero summer flick (HULC -- Human Universal Load Carrier), but you can see where it's headed: Tony Stark-land, right down to the military applications.

And it now comes with extra giant pill bugs.

The Dallas-Fort Worth arts news/reviews/blog/calendar website that book/daddy has been working on has launched. It's called Art & Seek. It's produced by KERA, the NPR/PBS station for North Texas.

book/daddy is writing in simple, declarative sentences this morning. That is all his mind can produce. book/daddy thinks the culture news/reviews/feature section (in light orange) should be bigger, so it doesn't look like just an enlarged listing or tout. That's about the best he can manage. What do you think?

This is the last week of classes in Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School for my daughter, the Comic Book Queen, pictured, left, in her self-portrait, entitled, Otto Dix, I Want to Paint Like You. Next week, the family arrives like invading Cossacks. The week after, she graduates.

 

Soooooo ... book/daddy is kinda busy right now, you know?