It’s a three-part discussion with KUT’s 2 Guys on Your Head, celebrating one great book! Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy in conversation with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to talk about their new book Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind. We’ll talk about everything from how to overcome writers block, to why time seems to speed up as we age.
book
Brain Briefs Book Launch [Part Three]
It’s a three-part discussion with KUT’s 2 Guys on Your Head, celebrating one great book! Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy in conversation with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to talk about their new book Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind. We’ll talk about everything from how to overcome writers block, to why time seems to speed up as we age.
Brain Briefs Book Launch [Part Two]
It’s a three-part discussion with KUT’s 2 Guys on Your Head, celebrating one great book! Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy in conversation with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to talk about their new book Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind. We’ll talk about everything from how to overcome writers block, to why time seems to speed up as we age.
Brain Briefs Book Launch [Part One]
It’s a three-part discussion with KUT’s 2 Guys on Your Head, celebrating one great book! Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy in conversation with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to talk about their new book Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind. We’ll talk about everything from how to overcome writers block, to why time seems to speed up as we age.
Your School Librarian
Whether you need to read a book for school or for book club, you can likely find it online as an ebook, audiobook, or have the real book shipped in a matter of hours. But before you head straight to the internet, remember that there’s a magic place you can look first. A place with people who would love to help you find what you need – all without relying on a wifi connection.
The Top 12 Quotes From ‘Lonesome Dove’
Spoiler alert! In case you’ve been under a rock in Ogallala for the last three decades, this story contains spoilers for “Lonesome Dove.”
Since I am, like many Texans, an amateur expert on “Lonesome Dove,” people often ask me what I figure are the most loved quotes from the miniseries.
If I were wise, I would just say any of a hundred quotes could be someone’s number one, and leave it at that. But I have never let lack of wisdom stop me. I cannot resist the challenge of making a list. I know it is a delicate business; it is holy ground.
But the list I’m about to share is not just my opinion. I do have data on my side, based on feedback from a popular Facebook page devoted to “Lonesome Dove.” From that page I have been able to tabulate the most popular quotes or excerpts from the miniseries:
No 12. Woodrow has just buried Gus and puts up the grave marker made of the famous Hat Creek Cattle Company sign. Woodrow says: “I guess this’ll teach me to be careful about what I promise in the future.”
No 11. When the boys seem a little shocked by Gus’, shall we say, manly appetites, he says: “What’s good for me may not be good for the weak minded.”
No 10. Right after Gus has cut the cards with Lorie and she accuses him of cheating. He says, “I won’t say I did and I won’t say I didn’t, but I will say that a man who wouldn’t cheat for a poke don’t want one bad enough.”
No 9. Not long before Gus goes guns blazing into Blue Duck’s camp to save Lorie, he says, “They don’t know it, but the wrath of the Lord is about to descend on ‘em.”
No 8. Gus finds July Johnson burying his son, and Jenny and Rosco. July is naturally distraught, blaming himself, saying he should have stayed with them. Gus says: “Yesterday’s gone, we can’t get it back.” But he does assure him that if he ever runs into Blue Duck again, he will kill him for him.
No 7. Gus gets exasperated with Woodrow because Woodrow, to Gus’s way of thinking, is being dense. Gus says: “Woodrow, you just don’t ever get the point – ‘It’s not dyin’ I’m talkin’ about, it’s livin’.”
No 6. This quote punctuates the scene when Jake Spoon must be hanged along with the murdering horse thieves he has thrown in with. Jake pleads his case but Gus has little sympathy. He says, “You know how it works, Jake. You ride with the outlaw, you die with the outlaw. Sorry, you crossed the line.”
No 5. The San Antonio bar scene has several great lines together, so I decided to count them as one quote.
The bartender, upon insulting Gus and Call, gets his nose broken when Gus slams his face into the oak bar. Gus explains: “Besides a whiskey, I think we will require a little respect. . . . If you care to turn around, you will see what we looked like when we was younger and the people around her wanted to make us senators. What we didn’t put up with back then was doddlin’ service, and as you can see, we still don’t put up with it.”
As they rode away, Woodrow tells Gus he’s lucky he didn’t get thrown in jail and Gus says, “Ain’t much of a crime, whackin’ a surly bartender.”
No 4. A touching line, uttered by Gus as he lay dying. He says to Woodrow: “It’s been quite a party ain’t it?”
No 3. This one is a tie – so close I couldn’t separate them.
The first comes at the first of the movie, back at Lonesome Dove when Bol infers that Gus may be too old for romance anymore and Gus sets him straight. He says, “The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
Following soon after that scene comes Call’s advice to Newt. Call hands him his first pistol and says, “Better to have that and not need it than need it and not have it.”
No 2. Gus lays out a prescription for Lorie’s future happiness. She is obsessed with going to San Francisco, and he wants her to understand that that dream is likely a misguided one.
“You see, life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want any one thing too badly, it’s likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things – like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.”
No 1. I began with Call and we end with him. Though Gus gets a great number of the best lines, Woodrow gets, without question, the most powerful, most quoted line of all.
After Call beat an army scout to a pulp, the horrified townspeople – who have never witnessed such violence before – are standing around in shock and seem to require an explanation. Call obliges them. He says, “I hate rude behavior in a man. I won’t tolerate it.”
There you go. That’s the top twelve according to the data. Now when you write to me to tell that the list is wrong or that I left out this or that, I ask only that you remember Captain Call’s admonition: No rude behavior.
When the Young Lieutenant Met the Wild Mustangs
He was 22 years old, riding his horse south of Corpus Christi in the vicinity of what would one day be called the King Ranch. But that wouldn’t happen for another twenty years.
This vast stretch of sandy prairie was still known as “The Wild Horse Desert.”
In some ways it was a spooky place – ghostly. You would see horse tracks everywhere, but no people. There were plenty of worn trails, but the population was merely equestrian.
Folks reckoned that these horses were the descendants of the ones that arrived with Cortez, when he came to conquer the Aztecs. Some had escaped, migrated north, and bred like rabbits (if you can say that about horses).
Our young man – actually a newly minted second lieutenant from West Point – was riding with a regiment of soldiers under the command of General Zachary Taylor. They were under orders to establish Fort Texas on the Rio Grande and enforce that river as the southern border of the U.S. Fort Texas would shortly become Fort Brown, the fort that Brownsville, Texas would take its name from.
The young lieutenant, who had excelled as a horseman at West Point, was so impressed with the seemingly infinite herds of wild horses in South Texas that he made a note of it in his journal. He said:
“A few days out from Corpus Christi, the immense herd of wild horses that ranged at that time between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was directly in front of us. I rode out a ways to see the extent of the herd. The country was a rolling prairie, and from the higher ground, the vision was obstructed only by the curvature of the earth. As far as the eye could reach to the right, the herd extended. To the left, it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I doubt that they could all have been corralled in the State of Rhode Island, or Delaware, at one time. If they had been, they would have been so thick that the pasture would have given out the first day.”
Both General Taylor and his Second Lieutenant would distinguish themselves on that journey.
Zachary Taylor had no idea that this Wild Horse Desert would lead to him on to victory in Mexico and to political victory back home. He would become the 12th President of the United States.
His dashing second lieutenant would also ascend to the presidency, 20 years after him.
The young man on high ground, surveying the primordial scene of thousands of mustangs grazing before him, would become the hero of many battles in the years ahead. He would ultimately lead the union forces to victory in the Civil War – and become the youngest president of the U.S. His presidential memoirs would become a runaway bestseller – a book Mark Twain would publish and call “the most remarkable work of its kind since Caesar’s Commentaries.” It is that book that gives us this story.
It was written by Hiram U. Grant. Well that was his birth name. But when he entered West Point, due to a clerical error, the name Hiram was dropped and his middle name became his first name, the name you know him by: Ulysses. Ulysses S. Grant.
Listen to the full audio in the player above.
W.F Strong is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. And at Public Radio 88 FM in Harlingen, Texas, he’s the resident expert on Texas literature, Texas legends, Blue Bell Ice Cream, Whataburger (with cheese) and mesquite smoked brisket.
Doug Dorst
Doug Dorst is a wonder at words and worlds. He’s a master of bringing the known and unknown, the mundane and the strange, into immediate proximity to one another is such a way that the line begins to fade. Whether it’s insecure police officers encountering restless ghosts romping through northern California in his debut novel Alive in Necropolis, or the dark inner lives of surf gurus and cake sculptors in his short story collection The Surf Guru, or the wild labyrinth voices, artifacts, and nightmarish locales of S., Dorst mingles nightmares and fantastical visions with earthy, recognizable emotions.
It’s an absolute pleasure to chat books and writing with Doug Dorst on this edition of The Write Up.
In 2009, Alive in Necropolis was awarded the Emperor Norton Award, and was a runner up for the Shirley Jackson Award, the IAFA/Crawford Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. It made the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was named one of the year’s best books by Amazon. The book was also chosen as San Francisco’s 2009 One City One Book selection.
He followed up his success with the beautiful and haunting story collection The Surf Guru, which also landed on the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was a Rumpus Book Club pick.
Not long after, director and producer J.J. Abrams picked him out to pen a novel in which the story would be found in the margins. Dorst crafted S., a complex but highly accessible book filled with handwritten notes in the text, loose napkins and postcards between the pages, and mysteries that stretch beyond the final chapter. The book is a marvel – a thrill for any lover of the printed word and fan of puzzles.
Dorst is an accomplished playwright, essayist, and, believe it or not, a three-time Jeopardy champion.
In our conversation we talk through his approach to writing, including writing habits, struggles, and how he finds his way into a story. We talk about the pressure of deadlines and joy of the blank page.
Doug Dorst is a celebrated teacher of creative writing who helps run the Texas State MFA program in San Marcos. He talks enthusiastically about his students and the feel of the workshop.
It is a thrill to have Doug Dorst on The Write Up. He is a pleasure to talk with – or just to listen to. The depth of his voice is matched only by the depth of his soul. So please join us as Doug Dorst, with charming humility, shares his passion for craft, teaching, and above all, storytelling