Shaking out the best of my notes from a wonderfully busy weekend at the 15th annual Texas Book Festival (visit The Reader blog for more festival coverage from my colleagues Joe Gross, Patrick Beach and Kathy Blackwell):
Laura Bush, who helped create the Texas Book Festival in 1995 and serves as its honorary chairwoman, discussed her best-selling memoir, “Spoken From the Heart,” Saturday morning with moderator Mark Updegrove. Camera flashes filled the Paramount Theatre with strobelike light during the first few minutes of Bush’s conversation with Updegrove, director of the LBJ Library and Museum.
Bush called reading her life’s “guiding passion” and talked about how books helped her fill long, empty hours when she was growing up in Midland, and how reading also served as a refuge during quiet, late afternoon hours in the White House when her day’s events were over and she was waiting for her husband, President George W. Bush, to return to the family quarters from the Oval Office.
The former first lady spoke warmly of the lifelong friendships she and her husband had made while growing up in Midland, and how those friendships sustained them during their time in the White House. And she spoke movingly of how family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reached out to her for comfort and how she treasures the new friendships she’s made with many of those family members.
Asked by Updegrove about the monthlong “purgatory” of the 2000 election recount in Florida, Bush said she and her husband would retreat to their ranch near Crawford to try to escape the limbo they were in, and it was during those retreats that the future president became “the brush-clearing Zen master,” she said with deadpan humor.
As a West Texan, Bush surely would have appreciated novelist and retired reporter Bryan Woolley’s heartfelt ode to his native land during the panel “110 in the Shade: Writing About the Southwest” early Saturday afternoon in a Capitol Extension room. Woolley grew up in Fort Davis and his description of the region’s space and light was evocative, resonating with this native West Texan and stirring a longing to revisit one of the best places Texas has to offer. Even though Woolley now lives in Dallas, and has lived in cities his adult life, because that’s where the big newspapers and reporting jobs are, he said, “My soul still lives in the Davis Mountains.” And he said that when he dies, he’s asked his family to scatter his ashes in the Davis Mountains. “Even after death,” he said, “I will still want the space and light.”
Earlier during the panel, Woolley read from his slim memoir, “The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman,” about his days as a young reporter for The El Paso Times. He described a few of the crimes, suicides and fatal accidents he covered on the police beat. The audience was absolutely silent, mesmerized by Woolley’s spare, direct prose — though some in the audience squirmed uncomfortably at the gruesome details.
Woolley was joined by panel moderator Katherine Durham Oldmixon, Austin poet Carrie Fountain, Tom Miller, a journalist who lives in Tucson, and short story writer Martha Egan of Santa Fe, N.M. Fountain, a graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, read a poem titled “The Continental Divide” from her award-winning debut collection, “Burn Lake.” Her poems are mostly set in New Mexico (Fountain grew up in Mesilla, N.M., near Las Cruces) and gracefully blend the past and present, the confessional with the historical.
The sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church was packed for conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke (right), who joked that a church sanctuary was “not a place where I’m accustomed to speaking” and worried about the appropriateness of the venue given the title of his new book, “Don’t Vote — It Just Encourages the Bastards.”
“So if lightning strikes us all ,” O’Rourke warned.
O’Rourke said we can look at politics as a version of the late-night sorority game Kill, Mess Around With (or what we will euphemistically call Mess Around With on this blog), Marry, and we can equate political power with the Kill part of the game, freedom with the Mess Around With part, and responsibility with the Marry part. The trouble, O’Rourke said, is that baby boomers have been controlling our politics for decades and that no generation in history has been as enamored with the power and freedom parts of the game or as unwilling to accept that responsibility is also part of the game as the boomers. And O’Rourke said he should know, since he is a boomer himself.
There were times when O’Rourke, preaching the virtues of a mostly unrestrained free market, seemed to confuse politics with government. He said at one point that politics never created a job. No, but government has — one only needs to consider defense spending, a perennial giant of a stimulus program. O’Rourke is a great wit, but behind the wit are a few arguments that buckle once the chuckles end.
O’Rourke closed with a crowd-pleasing anecdote about how unfair life is that I’m sure more than a few Austin parents will soon use on their own children. O’Rourke said that one day his 12-year-old daughter was whining on and on about how this wasn’t fair or that wasn’t fair and “I just snapped,” he said.
“I said, ‘Darling, you’re cute. That’s not fair. You’re smart. That’s not fair. Your family’s pretty well-off. That’s not fair. You were born in the United States of America. And that’s not fair. Darling, you should get down on your knees every day and thank God that life’s not fair.”