Kirjahaku

"We have often heard of nowhere and supposed it somewhere in Texas."--Galveston Times"I went to Texas and ran wild on her prairies."--William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) "God made Texas when he was a small boy and wanted a sandbox."--Folklore on the AmericanLand"A Texan ain't nothing but a human being way out on a limb."--John Wayne's line in The Searchers"We are a wordy bunch, always have been, and for almost two centuries, outsiders, intrigued by all the commotion down here in the Southwest, have come to inspect, dissect, cuss and praise. . . . Texas is a heroic story, the stuff of dreams and myths. Born of an impossible revolution, settled by peoples from somewhere else, Texas engendered the epic American notion of freedom and independence, of self-sufficiency and derring-do. Texas, above all else, has been a spiritual adventure--and the whole grand chronicle is there on library shelves, in newspaper clippings, old letters, written memories. There's little about Texas that hasn't already been said or written, and Texas Siftings is a kind of social catalog to much of it." So wrote Jerry Flemmons in the introduction to the first volume of Texas Siftings, which has been read and treasured by Texans, expatriate Texans, and would-be Texans from coast to coast. Now he's back with More Texas Siftings, an equally engaging and engrossing collection of stories both humorous and dramatic, letters, recipes, snippets of Texas language, outrageous praise and angry condemnation for the Lone Star State and its inhabitants.

His Texas is sometimes a place of sadness, even tragedy, sometimes a place of high jinks and great jokes, but most often, it's a place of vanishing traditions and long-ago days. It's here in this collection.

'Why am I an Iconoclast?...Sir, I am a seeker of Truth...[W]hen you get an idea, put it on the anvil and bid the world hit it with the heaviest sledge. The more you hammer Truth the brighter it becomes'. When an enraged reader gunned him down in Waco, April Fool's Day 1898, William Cowper Brann had published ""The Iconoclast"", the nation's most controversial magazine, for some forty months. It was the only American journal to claim a quarter-of-a-million monthly circulation, owing largely to Brann's gusto for offering up his 'truths'. Though his circulation was international, his favorite idols for smashing were those he found at home in Waco, nicknamed 'Six-Shooter Depot' and which exemplified, he believed, Texas' reputation for 'furnish[ing] forth more hidebound dogmatists, narrow-minded bigots and intolerable fanatics in proportion to population than any other section of these United States'. Though a twelve-volume 1912 edition of ""The Iconoclast"" resides here and there in rare book collections, public access to the writings of Texas' perhaps most infamous and entertaining journalist has been surprisingly limited. Jerry Flemmons' lexicon synthesizes the most memorable and current Brannisms into a facilely retrievable format. From America to Texas Politics to the Universe, these selected snippets prove how brightly indeed wisdom, wit, and the well-turned phrase survive pounding of the ages. But perhaps the beacon of ""O dammit!"" is the one-man, two-act play that Flemmons presents as a lecture by Brann on the last day of his life. Though it has been performed around Texas for more than a decade, it is a script whose every stage note and direction deserves to be read and whose every line reflects not only Brann's genius but also that of the man who's become the keenest authority thereon.