something about “In a Narrow Grave” by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was an American novelist and screenwriter who wrote mostly about the West. He was born in Archer City, Texas, about 25 miles from Wichita Falls. In a Narrow Grave, published in 1968, is a collection of Texas-related essays on cowboys, literature, sex, movies, and the life and people in small towns and big cities.

I read a 2018 edition with a new preface in which McMurtry suggests he has grown “weary” of his own prose. He also says, “The essays were a sort of bridge: behind me lay the mystic plain, ahead the metropolis of the muses. I wanted to cross; I hope I have.”

The early essays discuss the making of "Hud," which was shot in the Texas Panhandle and is based on Horseman, Pass By. McMurtry writes: "Hud, a twentieth century Westerner, is a gunfighter who lacks both guns and opponents. The land itself is the same—just as powerful and just as imprisoning—but the social context has changed so radically that Hud’s impulse to violence is turned inward, on himself and his family.” He adds that “His Cadillac is his gun.” McMurtry goes on to say that most of the remaining cowboys are middle-class.

I enjoyed all this.

In later essays on Texas’s big cities, McMurtry writes about Conservatism in Dallas and that “Wealth, violence, and poverty are common throughout Texas, and why the combination should be scarier in Dallas than elsewhere I don’t know. But it is: no place in Texas is quite so tense and so tight.”

McMurtry’s most popular works include Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), Lonesome Dove (1985), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). Amazing how much great stuff he wrote.

Note: "Hud," released in 1963, is an excellent movie starring legend Paul Newman as Hud Bannon, rebellious son of rancher Homer Bannon, who is played by the great Melvyn Douglas. Newman and Douglas spar, but the tension between Newman and the ruggedly honest Patricia Neal as Alma Brown, the Bannons' housekeeper, is ripe. Patricia Neal, one of my favorites.

 

a generous note about a Swedish hardcore punk band's EP

If you can’t win by reason

With an earth auger of a sound, “Mental Taxation” kicks off the new galloping seven-minute streak of an EP by Industrial Puke. The opening song’s thick, compressed production and deft chord changes represent the band’s best and only method.

Industrial Puke at times tries a regulated rhythm but cannot long resist the siren of speed. The one break from the forcible run comes at about a minute and a half into “Constant Pressure” with a slamming progression of chords—each chord stands out once from the blur. Then guitars harmonize and the song resumes its inevitable flameout.

The music bullies you, goes straight-ahead with insolent consistency—Industrial Puke happily suffers the hobgoblin of little minds. The band comes from where volume is power, volume overcomes weakness. Sound waves knock through the ear canal and shoulder into the tympanic membrane, like it or not.

The Swedish hardcore punk band started about 5 years ago. Time settling on a lineup and writing songs led us here, to Where Life Crisis Starts. The band put out its debut single and video, “Mental Taxation,” in June 2022, is partnering with Suicide Records to release this EP on September 16th, and plans to issue the full album Born into the Twisting Rope in spring of 2023.