Postscripts

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Busy Day(s), Busy People

Wednesday, February 3 will be a busy day in Austin for literary types. At noon, the HRC resumes its monthly Poetry on the Plaza series by holding a reading of works by Langston Hughes (read by UT senior Demetris Williams) and W.H. Auden (read by English professor Elizabeth Butler Cullingford) at the plaza in front of the HRC (21st & Guadalupe). Poetry on the Plaza celebrates the birth months of poets whose original works are preserved at the HRC. In case of bad weather, the readings will be held in the HRC's fourth floor auditorium... Choose your poets wisely: At 7pm, St. Edward's hosts poets Stephen Dunn (see "Getting Nature Write," p. 42) and at 7:30pm, the Michener Center brings Mark Doty to the auditorium in Calhoun Hall on the UT campus. Doty's reading may be a rare chance to hear him read from his new memoir from HarperCollins, Firebird, scheduled for publication this April... On Monday, February 1, the HRC opens its new exhibition Modernists in New Mexico: A Community of Writers, 1916-1941. It features over 300 rare books and manuscripts, photographs, and artworks covering such figures as D.H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Willa Cather, among others. The exhibition is in the Leeds Gallery, on the fourth floor of the Flawn Academic Center... Saturday, January 30 is also a big day, particularly for Borders: At 3pm, UT English professor Theresa Kelley, who won the 1998 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award for Reinventing Allegory, will talk about her book (and present a scene from Brave Little Toaster to make her point). At 7pm, Bruce Sterling reads from his latest novel, Distraction. From 3-5pm, Adventures in Crime & Space (609-A W. Sixth) brings C.J. Cherryh to read from her latest book from HarperPrism, Fortress of Owls.

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All Ears

One reason (the only?) to attend literary parties is that you can listen to writers debate the meaning of sayings like "he's all hat and no cattle." Jim Kunetka and Carolyn Osborn were discussing that particular phrase at a party last weekend; maybe calling them up and getting them to talk about it outside of a party environment is a bit like reading Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Freud -- you don't laugh after reading it. But since the phrase was new to me and I wanted to figure out where it came from, I did call them. Kunetka: "My interpretation is that he's just all talk and the context that I heard it in is he just pretends to be rich. I think it's one of those Texas sayings about somebody who has a lot of land but nothing on it." And Osborn's take: "All talk, you know, nothing to show for it ... somebody who is just full of gas (and there are plenty of those)." And then she started relating the phrase to a fable by Jean de la Fontaine, "The Mountain's Delivery," and as you can see below, that opens a whole new bag of worms:

A mountain having labor

With clamor rent the air

The neighbors who came running

Predicted she would bear

A city broad as Paris

Or at least a manor house,

But at the crucial moment

The mountain dropped a mouse.

How like so many authors

Who say they'll set to paper

A vast Promethean epic

But all that comes is vapor.