about jealousy in the aughts

I drove past your house five or six times that night, each time attending a funeral on the head of a screw.

I remembered you smoking outside in the stairwell while we huddled in the cold.

I remember all this like pillows on my face and pliers in my mouth. Disappear into that mountain in a brown study.

I cough my guts out, and clouds fall across the wall, the wall across the street falls before the sun. Master of manic episodes and creating them. 

 

another version of October sunsets in Texas

My last night in Dallas, the setting sun's light breezed through the kitchen window. It was so familiar. I felt my heart twist as the late afternoon gold mixed with shadows, and then the last rays slipped past and ran fingers through the treetops.

 

 

Note: Original post at https://damonwrites.blogspot.com/2021/10/about-texas-sunsets-in-october.html

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.

 

about Texas sunsets in October

The sunset in Texas in October brushes us familiarly. I feel a twist in my heart as the late afternoon's gold mixes with shadows that take more and more space—much more space now than what blocks the light. And then the last rays slip over me and run fingers through the treetops.

Note: What can you do but notice the beauty of it, even during the final minutes of the football game.

 

(posts) "What Am I Doing Hangin' Round" by The Monkees

"What Am I Doing Hanging 'Round?"

Just a loud mouth Yankee I went down to Mexico.
I didn't have much time to spend, about a week or so.
There I lightly took advantage of a girl who loved me so.
But I found myself a-thinkin' when the time had come to go...

What am I doin' hangin' round?
I should be on that train and gone.
I should be ridin' on that train to San Antone,
What am I doin' hangin' round?

She took me to the garden just for a little walk.
I didn't know much Spanish and there was no time for talk.
Then she told me that she loved me not with words but with a kiss.
And like a fool I kept on thinkin' of a train I could not miss...

What am I doin' hangin' round?
I should be on that train and gone.
I should be ridin' on that train to San Antone,
What am I doin' hangin' round?

Well it's been a year or so, and I want to go back again.
And if I get the money, well I'll ride the same old train.
But I guess your chances come but once and boy I sure missed mine.
And still I can't stop thinkin' when I hear some whistle cryin'....

What am I doin' hangin' round?
I should be on that train and gone.
I should be ridin' on that train to San Antone,
What am I doin' hangin' round?

Note:
At 0:24, Nesmith appears to sneer at someone (or something) off camera.

something about the documentary film "Into the Abyss" by Werner Herzog

In his review of "Into the Abyss," Roger Ebert starts off with this:

"Into the Abyss" may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

Well said. And here, at this cross-stitch of crime and poverty, the value of life runs threadbare.

Herzog documents the people and events surrounding a triple homicide in the small city of Conroe, Texas. The crime is violent and pointless, the sentences inconsistent and accidental. We hear from the convicted suspects, the families, investigators, and prison staff. With this crowd, Herzog has stumbled into a special kind of poor--a subculture of white, angry desperation that doesn't seem to know any other way. Herzog's approach is distanced, and he rations his usual pithy but insightful commentary.

When I think of an abyss, I think of a space in which blackness persists where the eye looks for light. The film's most glaring abyss is death row inmate Michael Perry: Seeing his youthful face, we expect--almost demand--him to show us something redeeming, something innocent. But it never comes. He is incapable probably of redemption or innocence.

But an abyss is also marked by its limitlessness, and even in this senseless loss, the victims' family attempts to salvage something. And another glimmer of hope (for those opposed to capital punishment) comes from a Death Row guard's turn away from death in favor of a universal right to life.

This is a very fine documentary, an effective and subtly powerful example of the form. Through Herzog's lens, overarching pointlessness and defeat lie naked. Presented with the abyss of the human soul, we find two thoughts juxtaposed: (1) No one has the right to take a life, and (2) some people don't deserve to live. There is no answer. Just traces of a spirit deeply buried within flaws and sad stories.

Roses are in bloom

A thought on the film No Country for Old Men

In No Country for Old Men, the killer Anton deals in consequences. He is the harbinger of the heartless world, a bringer of death who does not decide who lives and dies. To his mind, what you're doing and where you find yourself traces back to either chance or to some choice you made. He has no patience for ambiguity; fortunes hinge on the flip of a coin and once you call it, results are sure to follow. In this story, Anton's primary target is the hunter Llewellyn Moss.

Moss, now finding himself the prey, resists the inevitable, plotting his escape as best he can given what little wiggle room he has. He acts, and when acted upon, he counters. If ultimately the outcome falls to chance, he will throw his weight on the scale and make sure his chance is the fighting kind.

Sheriff Bell reflects on both men: Permanence and change, fate and self-determination weigh on his mind. He sees men like Anton as evidence the light is fading from this world. After fate claims Moss and untethered chance visits Anton, Bell is left awake in a world that's always been dark and cold, dreaming of the succession of humble men like him who can't do much about it.

Humberto Leal Garcia v. Texas

Texas executed a Mexican Thursday night. The state broke no US laws and had no binding obligation to follow International law or treaty. The man, convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl, had been in the country for several years prior to his crime, arrest, and his subsequent years of imprisonment.

The President, appealing to pending future legislation, International decorum, and potential risk to US citizens abroad, asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution. By a 5-4 decision, it did not.

The majority opinion goes unattributed. Here's highlights:

Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be.

... The United States and JUSTICE BREYER complain of the grave international consequences that will follow from Leal’s execution. Post, at 4. Congress evidently did not find these consequences sufficiently grave to prompt its enactment of implementing legislation, and we will follow the law as written by Congress. We have no authority to stay an execution in light of an “appeal of the President,” post, at 6, presenting free-ranging assertions of foreign policy consequences, when those assertions come unaccompanied by a persuasive legal claim.

The minority opinion includes this ...

Thus, on the one hand, international legal obligations, related foreign policy considerations, the prospect of legislation, and the consequent injustice involved should that legislation, coming too late for Leal, help others in identical circumstances all favor granting a stay. And issuing a brief stay until the end of September, when the Court could consider this matter in the ordinary course, would put Congress on clear notice that it must act quickly. On the other hand, the State has an interest in proceeding with an immediate execution. But it is difficult to see how the State’s interest in the immediate execution of an individual convicted of capital murder 16 years ago can outweigh the considerations that support additional delay, perhaps only until the end of the summer ...

... In reaching its contrary conclusion, the Court ignores the appeal of the President in a matter related to foreign affairs, it substitutes its own views about the likelihood of congressional action for the views of Executive Branch officials who have consulted with Members of Congress, and it denies the request by four Members of the Court to delay the execution until the Court can discuss the matter at Conference in September. In my view, the Court is wrong in each respect.

I respectfully dissent.

Compared to the majority opinion, the dissent sounds rather pointed.