Austin: A Paradise Built to My Specifications

All of these pictures come from a half-mile stretch of my daily drive down South First to campus. If I want to buy tacos on my way to or from work, I have at least twenty options--all right on my route, with varying specialties and price levels.  Interior Mexican, unabashed Tex-Mex, hipster taco trucks, you name it.  And I would have the same number of choices if I were to drive down South Congress or South Lamar.  

I don't take this bounty for granted: I fell in love with Mexican food as a kid living in Charleston where, at the time, there were two (2!) Mexican-style restaurants in the area.  When we moved to Fort Worth, I remember pulling out the Star-Telegram's weekly Dining section and marveling at the pages and pages of listings and reviews under the heading "Mexican."  But even Fort Worth can't compare to this.  This is amazing.

Recent Reads

Bad Writing and Bad Thinking (Rachel Toor, Chronicle of Higher Education)

Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in. And it's a result of lazy thinking. Most of us know that we may not be writing as well as we could, or should. Many academics have told me that they suspect they are bad writers but don't know how to get better. They are often desperate for help. I tell them to reread Strunk and White, and to take a look at "Politics and the English Language." Yeah, yeah, they say, and get buried working toward the next submission deadline, prepping for the next class.

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week (Sara Robinson, Alternet)

Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them?

The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls, and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he's really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.

French Children Don't Throw Food (When People are Watching) (Liz Garrigan, I am Carla Bruni's Neighbor), which I got to via The Truth About French Parenting (Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Atlantic).

In praise of the coffeehouse/bar

I love a good bar, and I love a good coffeehouse, but there's something to be said for those places that successfully combine the two. I bring this up because I'm writing from Caffe Medici (née Metro) where, at happy hour, the beer is cheaper than the coffee.

(And yes, I'm having both)

What does it mean that, after reading Caitlin Flanagan's Atlantic Monthly essay "The Autumn of Joan Didion," wherein she writes: "to really love Joan Didion--to have been blown over by thing like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase--you have to be female," I headed straight to the library to check out Slouching Towards Bethlehem?

Either A) I'm a girl or B) Flanagan is full of it with her gender essentialism. I'm leaning towards B.

But now I've read the book and, yes, it blew me over. Full-of-it-ness aside, Flanagan's essay nails the appeal (and the flaws) of reading Didion. The key to Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the short essay "On Keeping a Notebook," which contains the awesome line "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." Didion is asking why she records strange details about strange people--the kinds of details that fill all the essays in the book--and she decides:

I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect the line "That's my old football number" touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably "The Eighty-Yard Run." Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

And I guess it's the point of keeping a blog, too.

Outside the Broken Spoke, Austin.

Internet Favorites, ctd.

Continuing the festival of good writing and interesting thoughts:

Reminder (One-Way Ticket Back)

I knew Casey at One-Way Ticket Back when I was at the University of Houston. I was mastering English Lit, she was in the Creative Writing Program.

Football and Nachos, the Texan Way (Maud Newton, for The Awl)

I've actually researched Tex-Mex food (fajitas, nachos) for an encyclopedia that's coming out this summer. So I'm a bonafide expert on this subject. Seriously, it's on my CV. And I approve of this post.

All My Real Estate Agents Have Always Been Writers (Emma Straub, for the Paris Review)

Who is this Emma Straub? She can write. I also liked "My Rayannes."

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

This is an embarrassing confession: I haven't read any of David Foster Wallace's fiction. And I work about 100 yards from his whole archive, which I've never visited. Anyway, this made me want to dig into both. Because I also have a weakness for slightly embarrassing self-help writing.

Case in point:

Physicality (Art of Manliness)

Okay, the whole manliness angle is cheesy--physicality is important for men and women--but I really, really liked this essay.

Finally, two football posts, related to the Texas - Texas A&M bust-up. First, a contemplative one from an outsider:

A Strange Divorce in the Church of Football

And, to conclude, Barking Carnival's take on the rift between the Texas and A&M athletic departments: When the Lone Star Network All Came Apart.

Happy new year, readers!

Internet Favorites

To start 2012, I thought I'd share a few things I loved reading in 2011. First up:

in February, the Paris Review's blog ran this note on Patricia Highsmith and the mysteries of biography--why does a writer choose to dedicate a big chunk of her life and energy to writing about another writer?

Here's Schenkar's conclusion:

For at some point during my long, excruciating, rivetingly interesting relationship with this dead writer, we had somehow agreed to collaborate in rendering the trespasses of her life and the extremities of her work. By now, enough of her identity has leaked through the porous borders of her writing to perfuse my own, and I’ve been issued a passport to Highsmith Country that can never be revoked.

You might say—she would certainly say it—that Patricia Highsmith and I have become partners in crime.

I don't do biography, but what I do is so focused on three authors--Alejo Carpentier, James Weldon Johnson, and James Joyce--that I understood the feeling. And so I scoured the PCL for both Schenkar's book and Highsmith's fiction. But then I didn't get time to read any of it. Still, this post was great.