Unca Darrell

MARCH 24 / Vote early, vote often

UNCA D's COUSIN, Gwen Choate, is a quarterfinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Here's the contest site. You can find Gwen's entry by clicking "Fantasy," then scrolling to an entry titled The Sack. 

MARCH 24 / Nice personal site by friends

 

 

THE DEMOCRATIZATION of publishing through blogs has inspired many to report on their lives. Here's Viajando05, a personal blog by friends Kathy and David Altaras. It recounts their travels, photography, reading, and other activities. 

FEBRUARY 19 / I'm not that into Jane Austen

But the lady did know how to turn a phrase.

From Sense and Sensibility:

JANUARY 29 / John Updike

 

I ALWAYS MEANT to get around to John Updike but never quite did, except once, thanks to an airport remainder rack that offered Gertrude and Claudius. This lesser-known Updike novel retold the Hamlet backstory from the perspective of Mr. Melancholy's mom and stepfather. And a brilliant retelling it was:

JUNE 11 / Travel and read, read and travel . . . whatever

 

Friends David and Kathy Altaras maintain a blog for their travel adventures and Kathy's commentary on books.

The canary died Thursday

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Many American men stopped wearing ties years ago. Now even tie guys are giving up on them.

After 60 years, the Men's Dress Furnishings Association, the trade group that represents American tie makers, is expected to shut down Thursday.

Association members now number just 25, down from 120 during the 1980s power-tie era.

The thing to read is Texan Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, pages 781-782. He calls the transition from formal to casual styles of dress the "Unfitting."

Casualness took many forms, and to wear jeans that were torn and stained was casual, but only at the start. When one could go to a shop and buy the jeans ready-made with spots and patches, cut short and unraveled at the edges, the new intention was evident. When young women put on an old sweater, pearls, and evening pumps together, when young men went about in suits of which the sleeves covered the hands and the legs of the trousers were trod underfoot, they made known a rejection of elegance, a denial of feminine allure, and a sympathy for the "disadvantaged." Such clothes were not cheap; their style was anti-proprietary, anti-bourgeois; it implied siding with the poor, whose clothes were hand-me-downs in bad condition. To appear unkempt, undressed, and for perfection unwashed, is the key signature of the whole age. As in earlier times the striving was to look and [781/782] act like "quality," whether aristocratic or upper bourgeois, now the effort was to look like one marching along the bottom line of society. The hitherto usual motive behind self-adornment—vanity—had the advantage of concealing physical blemishes, thereby showing respect for the onlookers' sensibilities. The reverse, the self purposely uncared for, expressed at once a demotic anti-snobbery and demotic egotism.

The Unfitting appealed to the young but was not their monopoly. A sample of the casual style among adults had been to sport a business suit at the opera; this expanded into the open collor and not tie or jerseys and T-shirts almost anywhere, even in church. . . .

Clothing was but the most obvious sign of the demotic style. Other choices expressed the same taste, for example getting married underground in a subway station or around a pool in swimming suits. . . .

And the reference in the headline to "canary?"

That's the canary in the mine shaft of Western Civilization.

Three old bulls

Great thundering herds of conservative Democrats once ruled Texas.

For a century after 1874, Democrats ran Texas and one faction, conservatives, mostly mostly ran the party. Republicans? Well, they were the party responsible for Reconstruction.

Tradition held when Uvalde rancher Dolph Briscoe, 49, took his oath of office in front of the pink granite Texas capitol on a bitterly cold January 16, 1973.

In the 1972 primary and runoff, candidate Briscoe had defeated incumbent Preston Smith and the golden boy of Texas politics, Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes. Both were tainted by the Sharpstown banking scandal. In the runoff, he easily dispatched liberal Frances "Sissy" Farenthold.

Mr. Briscoe squeaked by the general election. The reverse coattails of the Democrats' unpopular presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern, dragged Republican challenger Hank Grover within a percentage point of winning. Briscoe was also hurt by Ramsey Muniz, candidate of the radical La Raza Unida.

But all was well on that inauguration day, or so it seemed.

Sharing the podium with the governor were Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, Attorney General John Hill, House Speaker Price Daniel, Jr., and Secretary of State Mark White, Democrats all. And the party still controlled the Texas Senate and House.

Also on the podium that day was the biggest Texas Democrat ever, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Four years out of the presidency, his now-longish silver hair curled over his ears and down his neck.

Six days later, he would be dead.

And six years later, a Republican would replace Mr. Briscoe as governor of Texas, driving a stake through the heart of the old one-party system.

Wednesday night---more than thirty-five years after he took office---Governor Briscoe spoke briefly at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. He was there to celebrate publication of his new memoir, Dolph Briscoe: My Life in Texas Ranching and Politics, as told to Don Carlton.

Sponsors of the event were two old bulls from 1973---Bill Hobby, who went on to become Texas's longest-serving lieutenant governor, and Mark White, who later served as Texas attorney general (after defeating James A. Baker, III), then one term as governor in a brief mid-1980s restoration.

Mr. Hobby and Mr. White were a few pounds heavier than their fighting weight and Mr. White's hair had gone, well, white, but both men were still in good form.

"If there is a single man, a single person, who exemplifies what Texas is all about, it's Dolph Briscoe," Mr. Hobby said from the microphone.

Don Carlton explained how hard it had been to convince the former governor to write his memoir. Talking about himself was like bragging, Mr. Carlton said, and for Dolph Briscoe, "bragging is right under lying and stealing and murder."

The governor himself, now 85, was frail. He had lost his beloved Janey in 2000. He used a walker and spoke from his chair, but his voice was strong as ever.

"This is a great time to be a Texan," he said. The state is "a land of opportunity for those who are willing to work, willing to apply themselves."

The audience was mostly old, mostly white, mostly dressed in suits and ties, and---one suspects---mostly Republican. 

The past has been great, Governor Briscoe continued, but the best is yet to come.

"I'd like to knock about 60 years off and start over."

As Governor Briscoe signed books, Governor White held court.

What had gone wrong for the Democrats? he was asked.

"I think we've been guarding the wrong border," he joked.

When Californians, New Yorkers, and others migrated to Texas looking for jobs in the 1970s and 1980s, he said, "they thought Democrats in Texas were like the Democrats back home." 

"We weren't."

William Forstchen

Thanks to William Forstchen, cowriter (with General Donald V. Bennett (Ret.)) of a Honor Untarnished: A West Point Graduate's Memoir of World War II, for permission to use the long quotation in yesterday's post. "The section you chose to quote is, in fact, my favorite, for it so clearly states what it was that our fathers' generation fought for and against. May we forever cherish their memories." Professor Forstchen's new book is Days of Infamy, cowritten with a little-known former Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich. 

Memorial Day, May 26, 2008

JOHN D. HANCOCK served with the 62nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion, which landed in Morocco in November 1942. He and his outfit saw action in Tunisia, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They were in North Africa and Europe for 32 months, then most of them returned home and resumed their lives, leaving behind their youth, their innocence, and friends who fell in battle. On this Memorial Day, my family remembers this good man, my father, and his comrades-in-arms, living and dead.

The things to read are Honor Untarnished: A West Point Graduate's Memoir of World War II by Donald V. Bennett, Jr., with William R. Forstchen; The Wonder of It All: A Memoir of an Armored Field Officer in World War II by Howard L. Carlson; and (if you can find a copy) The Story of the 62nd by William E. Ausburne, Jr.

From Bennett, pages 253-254:

"The front door cracked open, a middle-aged man looking out at us, wild-eyed. Hesitantly he came out and approached me.

"'Are you Americans?' he asked nervously.

"Smiling, I nodded.

"'Are you here to stay?'

(Click "Continue" under the picture.)

Main Plaza, Chinchero, Peru, September 23, 2003

Chinchero lies just north of Cuzco in the Peruvian Andes. When rain struck during our visit, vendors found refuge in trapezoidal niches in the enormous wall left by their ancestors. These women - a grandmother and granddaughter? - offered a study in contrasts. The older one, wearing native dress, sat squarely in the middle of the tight space. She smiled at the wet tourist with the camera and ceaselessly worked her red wool. The younger one, squeezed to the side by her older companion, leaned awkwardly against the wall. In appearance she was a westernized teen, unwilling to smile. Two women, different, both embedded for the moment in their common Inca past.