Dancing With the Infidels

Drifting Cursor
I am working on my favorite laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 4080XCDT, a wonderful machine except suddenly the cursor won't stop drifting--you know how they break loose and go drifting all over the screen and you try and control them and it takes a lot of tugging on the tiny joystick to rein it in and pen it up so it can do what it was designed to do, not drift, but point so I can click.

Joel Lieberman Won, Yet, He Didn't
The poor numbskulls on all the network morning news programs have instructions to make it seem like Joel Lieberman won his Connecticut primary with Ned Lamont though as a matter of fact, something teevee avoids like the plague, JOEL LIEBERMAN LOST, got his old tired one-tune ass whipped, though, of course, he's not conceding yet, which is also a lie--as I type this the cursor is drifting a few inches at a time--he has to concede defeat, he lost, but Joel is spinning it by saying he's not conceding overall defeat--that comes in November when Joel will reappear again this time as an independent in his effort to help bring down the Dumbocratic Party again like he did when he and Al "the Loser" Gore went pathetically up against Bush in 2000 with a wet Kleenex when they should have been carrying some thought-provoking two-by-fours to use against the concrete heads of the Repugnicans--except, and here's Joel's biggest problem, Joel Lieberman really loves Georgie Porgie Bush, our "president," and thinks he's doin' a heck of a job." Well, hell, Joel, it seems the people of Connecitcut, the affluent suburb of New York City, think you're doin' a heck of a job, too, Joel, and you're headed in the same direction as all those other politicians doing a heck of a job.

By the bye, Connecticut is Georgie Porgie's true home state; he's a Texan by virtue of hanging out in the corner drugstores down in Midland, Texas, where he learned how to be a drugstore cowboy while at the same time staying a spoiled little rich boy sorry little son of a bitch, an asshole whether in Connecticut or Texas. "Drugstore cowboys" is what my father and his West Texas quarterhorse-bustin' buddies called Yankees who came to Texas to change their images from wimps to glorified wimps in so-called Texas cowboy props. Not that Georgie Porgie didn't adapt well; that he did; he has become a fairly fine Texas lyin', cheatin', Mexican whorin' hotshot with enough borrowed bullshit in him to make him an honorary member of the Texas Confederate Air Force, a high honor among Texan drugstore cowboys who hate messkins and kneegrows, the very cultures that give Texas its most dignity--and there is a lot of dignity in the best Texas musics and literature.

Red Dirt Marijuana by Mason Hoffenberg (oh, I forgot, he changed his name to Terry Southern) is some of the best Texas writing I've ever read, though I highly disagree with The Dallas Morning News in their recent article on the seven best Texas writers ever, two of which are not even native-born Texans.

The Morning News listed as #1 Larry McMurtry--and you can't leave Larry (a North Texas State grad) off this list because he's too damn popular in terms of book sales and he's really hit it big in Hollywood and therefore Texas, too. Plus he's controversial among Texas literati in that he turned against the old-line-legal-reserve it-all-started-with J. Frank Dobie crowd, saying that new Texas wasn't anything like the dream image those old Texas writers had in their minds about their Texas.

Just because your books get made into hit movies doesn't mean to me, however, that you're a great writer, but, hey, popularity is what makes you world-renown and being world-renown covers up a lot of problems you have as a writer, though McMurtry, I'll admit, is a great writer, though maybe far away from being the greatest ever from Texas--though I can't argue against Larry numbers.

They listed Katherine Anne Porter next--and again, who can argue? She's sentimentally certainly a Texas writer, but whether she's REALLY a Texas writer or not is another argument--Ship of Fools is a great book; whether it's a great Texas book is also another argument.

They listed John Graves next--now here I totally agree with them; John Graves is a hidebound, locked in, totally Texas writer--his very sentences are Texas sentences spoken in the native Texas language. Goodbye to a River is one of the best books ever written--but especially to a Texan.

And then they listed next, Terry Southern. Again, I think they're basing their opinion on Terry's amazing success in Hollywood, though they do mention Red Dirt Marijuana as one of his best books.

My brother was a famous Texas writer, sometimes called the "dean" of Texas writers, so I am very biased in my opinion of Texas books--and I certainly disagreed with my brother a lot on just who were good writers, and one of my brother's books, his best book even to me, is a Texas classic and even I have to put down my familial jealousy and admit that. He would take solid issue with this Dallas Morning News list (a paper on whose staff, ironically, he was a leading columnist for many years). He would certainly allow McMurtry and Graves to stay on the list, maybe Katherine Anne Porter, but I don't know if Terry would have made my brother's list. But
then my brother was from that generation McMurtry put down in his book In a Narrow Grave, a book I feel was written to contradict my brother's Texas-literary viewpoint, you know, like I said above, McMurtry feeling my brother's type of Texas writing had more or less vaporized over the rapidly changing years in just plain ole Texas culture since his time of fame, the middle to late sixties. I see now, today, four years after his death, my brother's criticism and list of great Texas writers is being blown away in the winds of vaporizing time. New Texas writers probably don't invision Texas the way he did and they're probably right, though he was right, too, in his time.

One of those writers the Morning News mentions as one of the best-ever Texas writers was born in Providence, Rhode Island. I don't suppose anybody would ever classify me as a New York writer, would they? But then New York writers aren't classified in the same way Texas writers are.

I have to retract a bit of my piss notes; Donald Barthelme, who, to me, should be one of those seven best Texas writers, was born in Philadelphia--moved to Houston when he was 2; when it comes to postmodernism (whatever that is, as Charles Ives would quip), Donald wrote the book. I retreat in sackcloth and ashes; a great Texas writer, I guess, doesn't really have to be born in Texas; the same as a great Texas "president." Hell, the father of white Texas, Stephen F. Austin, wasn't born in Texas; nor was old Mister Sam, Sam Houston; nor were any of the heroes of the Alamo. But writers need awards and they need to make these lists no matter whether they are simply just plain ole WRITERS or Texas writers or South Dakotan writers or whatever kind of writers they are. The ones I know and love are certainly great American writers of the American language. I'll give 'em that.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

THE MAIN THING IS FROM thegrowlingwolf's TIDBIT IS THAT:

JOEL LIEBERMAN LOST TO NED LAMONT. Great going, Connecticut Dumbocrats. Uncle Joel is free to become a Repugnican like his hero, Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie, our "president" [NEVER ELECTED HONESTLY; THE FIRST PRESIDENT EVER APPOINTED BY THE SUPREME COURT].

note: In the meantime, the citizens of old blown-away New Orleans are still being treated like so many flies on shit by the rest of us citizens of the U.S. We, like us here in wherever we are, sit in comfort, with our beers, our fine wines, our plasma-screen teevees catching 600 channels of pure-dee bullshit framed in constant advertisements and commercials (or those wicked pests the infomercials), after eating our processed food, kicking off our shoes, washing our dirty asses, maybe taking some hits of some favorite Neo-Con drug, kicking off into a dreamworld of hi-fi wonderment and pixie perversions, to wake up, refresh ourselves--I mean some of us brush our teeth with machines--I mean some of us are so F-ing luxuriously lazy we can't even raise our hands up and down a few minutes to brush teeth--eat a power breakfast--"Oh, those muffins weren't baked right this morning; I've got to go back to Zabar's, dammit; I should have listened to Trixie on Good Day New York this morning--oh well, gotta go to my 6-figure job in my 6-figure Hummer--not at all worried about getting blown to smithereens by a car bomb going off under some tall building--Hell, that'll never happen here...oh, yeah, 9/11, we forgot. See what we mean? Too much monkey business; Gore Vidal is right.

A Daily Growler Sports Extra With Marvelous Marv Backbiter
Hey nonny-nonny and a hey hey! The Yankees are at least 3 games up on the damn Boston Red Sox now and the Mets (they got ex-Yankee Ricky LeDay today) have already cinched, I think, the National League everything. There's no National League team that can beat the Mets now; they've proven that. So, hey, sorry the rest of youse, but here comes a Subway World Series. This time for a Yankee fan old enough to remember, it's gonna be like the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers World Series--Whitey Ford vs. Sandy Koufax will now be Randy Johnson vs. Pedro Martinez! Hot Damn! Mike Mussina vs. Tom Glavine. More hot damns on that one!

The Yankees just won by the hair of their chinny-chin-you-kinow-whats tonight, 7-6 over the White Sox, a hell of a hitting machine. Mariano Rivera came through after Randy Johnson pitched no-hit baseball until the seventh when he went into a tailspin giving up two runs before being lifted for one of the Yankees Double A Miracle Relievers, Carl Vallone, though another of their Double A Miracle Relievers, Farnsworth, managed to give up 4 runs and let the White Sox get within 1, then fought back in the ninth against Rivera, first getting a hit batsman, Anderson, on first, then giving up a base hit, and with two out and the tying run at third and the winning run at first and Jim Thome was the batter, and the Mighty Mo got Thome to hit a squibbler to Jeter, who flipped to second for the force out and the Damn Yankees won it!

It's a good year for this baseball fan. About the best ever year, as a matter of fact.

Managers of the Year: Joe Torre and Willie Randolph. Makes an old Yankee fan proud.

marvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler