I Might Have Texas Pride Someday...

Sweet, one of the places I'm considering for grad school... Austin, Texas.

James Hynes presents a literary guide to West Texas (for more, also check out Bookslut and Maud):

I am not a Texan. Mind you, I'’m not apologizing, though maybe I am being a little bit defensive. Texas was its own country once, and Texans have never come close to getting over it. Just last week, on North Lamar here in cosmopolitan Austin, I saw a homeless guy wearing a black T-shirt that said, in big white letters, "Fuck y'’all. I'’m from Texas." Which is a hilarious and even charming sentiment from a homeless guy, but not so funny when it comes from, say, the president of the United States. But there you have it: Dagoberto Gilb has pointed out that Texas literature has more of a national character than a regional one, and all I'm saying is, as your tour guide to West Texas literature, I'm a foreigner, a native Michigander, an NPR listener, a daily reader of the New York Times, a Midwestern college-town liberal, a wearer of Birkenstocks, an atheist. A Yankee, in short. So the selection of books that follows is by no means an official one. They'’re just the books about West Texas that I love.

In that spirit, I thought at first I wouldn'’t mention Larry McMurtry at all (just like I'’m not going to mention Cormac McCarthy, except in passing), but then I decided that was just too willfully idiosyncratic, like writing about Elizabethan England and not mentioning Shakespeare.

Too funny. Great, now I'll have some great Texan reading to prepare me, a born'n'raised Northern Yankee, for the Southern Comfort. Hey, I have pride, maybe I'll finally be able to attribute it to something and make it Texas pride. More on Texas from native Maud Newton.

Fuck y'all, I'm from Minnesota... um, yeah, doesn't have the same effect. I won't even try Ohio.