Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Texas/Regional

  • Quest of a hoe hand (Essay by Robert Flynn)

    I noticed that my college writing instructor Robert Flynn is 94 today. Quite randomly I stumbled upon a personal essay which my college writing teacher Robert Flynn (Home, W) had published in the Houston Chronicle in 1998. It is a beautiful essay, and I am reposting it here to celebrate Robert Flynn’s 94th birthday. See also my 2007 audio interview with Robert Flynn. Editorial Note: In the middle of the essay, It appears that the digital version might be missing a sentence. I will look up the original essay and try to rectify that. Stay Tuned. RJN

    Robert Flynn, 2008, Picture by Robert Nagle, (Source: WIkipedia)

    Quest of a hoe hand – He began digging for universal truths as a young writer in Chillicothe, Texas – and he’s still at it.
    March 15, 1998 | Houston Chronicle (TX)
    By ROBERT FLYNN; Novelist Robert Flynn is writer in residence at Trinity University in San Antonio. | Page: 8 | Section: TEXAS MAGAZINE

    To be a writer in Texas is to have your eyes opened to truth and beauty. A friend and I were standing in the cotton field one day. It was one of those 100-degree North Texas days when the hot wind blows – and the wind always blows, and it always blows either hot or cold. And the only thing there is to move is sand. And the sand moves every time the wind blows. We were leaning on our hoes, and way off in the distance we could see a pickup truck going down a country road and leaving a cloud of dust behind it. We must have stood there, transfixed, for 10 or 15 minutes, just admiring that cloud of dust on the horizon. My friend said, “Ain’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?” It was my introduction to beauty.

    My introduction to truth was not so dramatic. My grandmother was born in Vermont in 1842. That was the year the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed between the United States and England settling the boundary of Canada west of Lake Superior. She married my grandfather who was an Irish immigrant and followed him to Texas where he helped build the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. Grandmother bore him three sons, all born at a constantly moving end of the track. Near Chillicothe my grandfather bought a piece of land. A few years later, in 1897, he was murdered. Grandmother hung on to that piece of land and she doomed her children to do the same.

    Every day both going and coming from the two-room country school I attended, I had to cross over the railroad tracks my grandfather helped to lay. And in both directions the tracks ran as far as the eye could see. A few miles to the east and we would have been in an oil field. A few miles west and we would have been on land good for nothing but running cows and chasing jack rabbits. Slowly the truth appeared on the horizon. My grandfather had been tricked into buying the only place in 20 miles

    The cotton field is one of the great classrooms of life. Put a young man in a cotton field, place a sack on his back or a hoe in his hand, and right away his thoughts will turn to truth and beauty. A far-off look will come into his eye. Put a young man in a cotton field and he will take up prayer. “Lord, if you will just get me out of this- I will never again as long as I live look at the women’s underwear in the Sears catalog.”

    It was in the cotton field that I first learned the power of the English language. I had a girlfriend who chopped cotton with me. She was called a hoe hand. I know because my mother told me. As I stood there all alone in the cotton field – my girlfriend had been sent home because I used the wrong word – it came to me like a flash of light that if the wrong word like hoer had the power to move my mother to such action, just think what using the right word – like hoe hand – could accomplish.

    That was when I first got the notion of being a writer. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We didn’t go in much for writing at the country school I attended. Writing was something that was done by weirdos and other New Yorkers. Real men studied penmanship. We made little push-pull lines all over the page. And row after row of spirals. It was called the Palmer Method and was invented during the Spanish Inquisition as a means of turning boys from writers to pray-ers. “Lord, if you will just get me out of this I will never touch another pencil. And I will never again drop my eraser and try to look up Myrtle Bailey’s dress.”

    But we knew what a writer was. A writer was somebody who was dead. And if he was any good he had been dead a long time. And if he was real good, people killed him. They killed him with hemlock. Hemlock was the Greek word for Freshman Composition.

    The country school I attended was closed and we were bused to Chillicothe. Chillicothe had a teacher who had seen England. From a boat. She had discovered truth and beauty from eight miles offshore and had come to Chillicothe to share her vision with picturesque rustics. With some timidity I confessed that I too hankered after truth and beauty.

    Chillicothe is small. Chillicothe is so small there’s only one Baptist church. Chillicothe is so small you have to go to Quanah to have a coincidence. For a good coincidence you have to go to Vernon.

    Chillicothe was fairly busting with truth and beauty and my teacher encouraged me to write about it.

    I decided to write about my father. My father, the youngest of three sons, was born in a boxcar at the end of the track that has since come to be called Chillicothe, Texas, thus becoming the first born in my hometown. The boxcar served as the station house for the railroad and was, with the exception of a dugout that served as a store, the only building in town. I wrote that my father was born in the finest house in Chillicothe.

    My teacher told me to write something that had an epiphany. For an epiphany you had to go all the way to Wichita Falls.

    I wrote about Delmer Lance’s pet heifer, Snuggles. Snuggles was raised on a bottle and was as friendly as you’d want a heifer to be. Until Delmer locked her in the barn with his range bull, Bradley. The next morning, Snuggles was gone. Also the barn door. The top rail off the fence.

    Delmer chased the cow all over the country but Snuggles went wild as a new rope. One night Delmer was driving down the highway and ran into Snuggles. Delmer said he recognized her when she passed over the windshield by the puzzled look on her face. That was an epiphany. I spent half my life thinking I could recognize a bad girl by the puzzled look on her face.

    My teacher said to write about something that had happened to me. I wrote about the year there was a blizzard and everybody from the two-room country school – two teachers, 38 pupils and three adults who had sought refuge in the school – had to walk two miles through the snow to our house to spend the night. I remembered it because that was the day my father came home with 400 baby chickens and it was so cold we had to keep them in the house. All over the house it was butts and feathers.

    Forty-two chickens were squashed in the linoleum. Three drowned in the chamber pot. One was crushed when Ed Byars put on his boots. When Mother lighted the gas oven 13 went up like a torch. Three more were scorched so bad that Dad threw them out in the snow. Ed Byars spent the rest of his life minus the end of his nose because he preferred frostbite to the smell of singed chicken feathers.

    My teacher said I didn’t know the first thing about truth or beauty. I promised to go to England the first chance I got. Or at least Korea. She loaned me books that were not available in the Wilbarger County Library, books that had been written by real writers.

    Real writers wrote about such things as I had never heard of. Damsels. Splendor falling on castle walls. For splendor we had to go to the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show. Since I wasn’t overly familiar with damsels and splendor, I tried reading what real writers wrote about rural life. “Dear child of nature, let them rail. There is a nest in a green vale.” Which was pretty mystifying to me. I remember asking Bubba Spivey, “Don’t writers get chiggers like everybody else?”

    I set out looking for a green vale to make a nest in and when I got there I found out what made it so green. When it comes to vales, a cow will get ahead of you every time.

    I wrote a story that contained the wisdom of the world in eight poetic pages of arcane words and mysterious imagery full of towers, turrets and spires. My teacher loved it. She had never met a symbol she didn’t like.

    Assured of success, I went to college to become a writer. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to reveal the false hopes, the futile dreams, the fleeting victories, the glorious visions, the hidden desires, the sudden and secret joys, that bind us into one humanity. I wanted to refine the language, to explore the avenues of communication, to stretch the limits of understanding, to probe the mysteries and futilities and glories of man, to heal his broken spirit, to restore his sense of purpose, to discover the nature of beauty and truth, and to sell it to the movies for a million dollars. After which I intended to marry a movie star and move to Paris, Texas. Or at least Commerce.

    My instructor told me the way to find truth and beauty was to write about heroes and villains, good people vs. bad people. The best people I knew did bad things, and the worst people I knew did good things. We weren’t heroes or villains, we were just puzzled. How could I write about the people I knew when I was attending a college that did not approve of dancing? Smoking. Swearing. Drinking. Dating members of the opposite sex. Dating members of the same sex. I used to pray, “Lord, if you will just get me out of college I will never be a Christian again.”

    We were told to write a love story containing truth and beauty. I was petrified. I had never seen a moat or a moor. I had never known a knight or a knave. I was the only great lover I knew. The only time I came close I began nuzzling the girl’s ear and lost my chewing gum in her hair. It was Bazooka bubble gum and I hadn’t gotten all the sweet out of it. I spent the next hour and 45 minutes alternating between kissing her eyes and frisking her scalp, and holding my hands over her eyes while chewing her hair. Her mother called her three times before my jaws came unstuck.

    I wrote about a boy and a girl. He is true. She is innocent. They have found a nest in a green glade. They smoke a Salem. They speak of truth and beauty.

    I threw the story away. I wrote about a boy and a girl. The boy is generally true. The girl is relatively innocent. They find a meadow. The sun is hot, the wind roughens their complexion. They smell of sweat and Salem cigarettes. He speaks of love with some truth. She has a puzzled look on her beautiful face.

    I tore up the pages. A boy and a girl. He is a bastard. She is a bitch. They are lying in a pasture among cow dung. Scratching chigger bites. The blazing sun raises blisters on his back. He has a herpes on his lip. She has bologna breath. He whispers obscenities into her ear. He loses his gum in her hair. It is Fleers bubble gum and still has some of the sweet in it. Her mother calls. He gnashes his teeth.

    I tore my hair.

    I wrote about Bud Tabor. Bud was a married man, and Sherry McIlroy’s father shot him through Box 287. Ed McIlroy was the postmaster and when Bud came in to get his mail, Ed stuck a pistol in the open end of the box and shot Bud in the eye. Ed was a conscientious man and he waited until Bud opened the box and looked inside so as not to deface government property.

    They never found Bud Tabor’s eye. Buried him without it. They fixed him up with a glass eye for the funeral, but Sherry and Bud’s wife got in an argument over who got to keep it as a souvenir. Sherry won. Put it on a chain and wore it hanging down between her breasts. Folks used to say Bud may have gone to hell but his eye went to heaven. Some folks’ idea of heaven is mighty small. Larger on one side than the other.

    My instructor said it was not a love story.

    Delmer Lance had some sheep but they developed an unnatural affection for an old yellow dog. They followed the dog wherever it went. No pen could hold them for long, and once they were on his trail, the dog couldn’t shake them. In desperation the dog ran away from home, the sheep right behind him.

    From time to time the dog and sheep would show up at someone’s tank or feed trough, the dog looking gaunt and haunted eyed, the sheep looking all unraveled. Elmer Spruill shot the dog. Elmer said he couldn’t stand the puzzled look in the dog’s eyes.

    My instructor said there was no beauty, no truth and no moral.

    Lowell Byars came to the county with his wife, Lou. They lived in a dugout and poor-boyed, working as long as there was light to see. There was no time for visiting neighbors or going to church, just day after day of chopping weeds and carrying water, with nothing to eat but biscuits and gravy, and nothing but the gritty quilts Lou’s mother had given them to sleep on.

    The roof of the dugout caved in during a rainstorm, they were dispossessed for two days by a skunk, the crops blew away in a sandstorm. But Lou stuck it out, and if she cried of loneliness or despair it was when Lowell was away from the dugout. One morning Lowell got up early as usual and said, “Get dressed, Lou, we’re going to Quanah to see the Mollie Bailey show.”

    Lowell milked the cow, fed the mules, hitched the wagon, and when he got back to the dugout he had to fix breakfast. Lou was still brushing her hair. They drove to Quanah and watched the wagons come in, drawn by elephants. They looked in the store windows and stared at the crowd of people in town. They drank lemonade and had a supper of sardines and crackers and saw the show and it was over, time to get in the wagon and start for home.

    It was a long way back to the dugout and Lowell knew he would have to get up early the next morning to make up for the work he had missed but he didn’t care. The moon was bright, a thousand stars twinkled in the sky, and he had shown his wife a sight. Lowell felt pleased with himself.

    “It ain’t so terrible being married to me, is it?” he asked Lou who was sitting silent and sleepless beside him. Lou began to cry. She cried all the way home. She cried all night. When he got up the next morning she stopped crying to fix his breakfast, but she wouldn’t speak to him for three more days until he cut his hand heading red top maize and she had to ask how he was.

    Lowell promised to take her to the Christmas dance and rather than disappoint her they drove 15 miles in an open wagon in the face of a norther. Lou danced every set of the all night dance. She went home with a fever, took pneumonia and died of frivolity.

    I had found a story with a moral but I also found it wasn’t easy writing about people I knew. I got all puzzled. I didn’t know what was beautiful, and what was foolish, and where truth lay. Was Lou Byars a silly girl unsuited for a rugged country? Was she the innocent victim of a foolish dream? Or was she a tragic heroine who knew that the quality of life was not measured by the years endured in twilight, but by the moments spent in the candle’s flame?

    Ideas are neat. You can outline an idea. You can label an idea. Ideas don’t bleed. They don’t cry. They don’t blame you for their unhappiness. They don’t die of frivolity. But a person has many faces. Some of them are vain, and some are foolish, and many are secret.

    It looked like for truth and beauty you had to cross Red River. All I knew about was a little place called Chillicothe. And it wasn’t even the Chillicothe that was on the map. It was a little place I called Wanderer Springs that existed only in my mind. And all I had to go by was my grandmother who died at the age of 90 the year I was born, and that my father was born in a boxcar at the end of the track. Would truth and beauty as I wrote it stand up against the reality of my grandmother? Would my

    I wrote the love story of Grover and Edna Turrill. When he was 16 Grover had married Edna, at the request of both families.

    Grover’s father gave them a milk cow, and Edna’s father gave them a steer. Grover yoked them together and started to California. It was his promise to Edna.

    They crossed Red River and stopped near Preston where Edna had a baby boy with no one to help her but Grover. They started again as soon as she was able to travel, Edna and the baby in the wagon, and Grover walking beside the wagon, prodding the ox and milk cow, and picking up firewood.

    One day Edna placed the sleeping baby in the back of the wagon and got out to walk beside the cow. Grover found a tree stump and not knowing the baby was in the back of the wagon, he threw in the stump, killing his child. Some cowboys found them, two teen-agers traveling across the prairie with a dead baby wrapped in a quilt. The cowboys buried the child.

    Grover and Edna were still on their way to California when the milk cow died near Wanderer Springs. They lived in the wagon while Grover broke the land with the steer and planted a crop. Later they built a house and had two more children. When Billo was 12 he went hunting on Wanderer Creek with some older boys. They ran a coon up a dead tree, and Billo was sent up the tree to shake the coon down. A pile of brush had been washed up under the tree and the older boys set it afire so that Billo could see. The dead tree caught fire and Billo was burned so he couldn’t lie down and Edna and Grover took turns holding him the four days it took him to die.

    A few years later, when Polly was 13, she complained of a stomachache. Polly wasn’t fat, but like Edna, she was slope-shouldered, solid and a good eater. When she was unable to eat breakfast, Grover hitched up the wagon, made a pallet in the back, and with Edna to comfort Polly, they started for the doctor in Wanderer Springs, several miles away. The wagon had no springs, the road was just a set of ruts across the prairie, and Polly whimpered the whole way although Grover drove as slowly as he dared.

    When they got to Wanderer Springs, they found that Dr. Vestal had been called out of town. Over near Medicine Hill, folks thought, expected to be gone all day. Polly was too sick to wait so they started for Medicine Hill, sending word ahead by Buster Bryant who volunteered to carry the message.

    It was August and the sun was hot and Polly cried out at every bump, so Edna stood and held a quilt to shade her, and Grover drove the mules as fast as he dared. They met Buster Bryant who had missed Dr. Vestal somehow. The doctor was on his way to Bull Valley. Grover turned the mules toward Bull Valley with Buster racing ahead.

    Dr. Vestal had left Bull Valley for Red Top. Buster rode to head off the wagon. The mules had played out and Grover was walking beside them to lighten the load. Edna was standing with her feet spread, holding the solid little girl in her arms, trying to absorb the bumps and shocks of the wagon with her own body. Buster told them to go home. He would find Dr. Vestal and meet them there.

    It was almost dark when the wagon got back home and Buster and the doctor were waiting. Edna was sitting beside Grover holding Polly who was so big she lay across both their laps. The mules stopped of their own accord and neither Grover nor Edna made a move to get down. Dr. Vestal started to the wagon but Grover said, “I don’t want you to touch her. We’ve been praying for you all day and listening to her die. I know it ain’t your fault, but I don’t want to see you now.”

    Buster stayed with the Turrills although he didn’t dare go in the house. He unhitched the mules and fed them and sat out on the porch. After a while Grover came out. He sat on the porch and stared at the dark, empty, treeless miles over which he had ridden that day, listening to the shriek of the wagon wheels and the dying cries of his last child.

    After a while Edna came out also and learned against the porch post, hugging the porch post as though it were a child, her head hanging down a little as though permanently bent from ironing clothes and chopping cotton. She waited while the last light of day faded and one by one the stars came out, watching the prairie that under moonlight had a sheen like a silent sea.

    “If that cow hadn’t died, we’d be in California,” Grover said.

    “Old Boss,” Edna said, remembering the name over all the years, recalling the dreams they had shared as they traveled across the prairie in the wagon.

    “Damn country,” Grover said. “Washes away every time it rains. Blows away every time there’s a wind. Hail or grasshoppers every damn year. Hot as hell or cold as hell. Flood or drought. Too dry to plant, too wet to plow – “

    “Yeah,” Edna said, nodding her head in the darkness. “But ain’t it purty.”

    Truth in the mythical kingdom of Wanderer Springs was neither comic nor tragic, neither big nor eternal. And it was revealed through the lives of common folk who belched and fornicated, and knew moments of courage, and saw beauty in their meager lives.

    But Grover Turrill gave me some problems. Some readers thought the vocabulary was offensive. I could not write about the people I knew without using the vocabulary they knew. My father did not believe a cowboy said “golly bum” when a horse ran him through a barbwire fence.

    I went to see Clifford Huff. Clifford was a horseshoer and he had been kicked, bitten or stepped on by every horse in the county. It gave him an extensive vocabulary. I asked Clifford the worst words he knew. He said they were “yes and no.” He had said yes when his wife, Letty, asked him if he was playing around and he had said no when she asked him if the gun was loaded. They had been married 33 years when Letty shot him once through the pantry and twice up the stairs.

    Words are not casual things. They are powerful. Even explosive. Words can start wars, or families. Words can wound, they can shock and offend. Words can also heal, and explain, and give hope and understanding. Words have an intrinsic worth, and there is pride and delight in using the right word. Anyone who chops cotton with an axe is a hoer.

    I don’t know whether or not Travis drew a line at the Alamo. Maybe that story is myth. I do know that every writer draws the line. Must draw the line. Whether he is dealing with teachers, advisers, well-wishers, editors, publishers, critics or the public. This is my kingdom. These are my people. I know them better than anybody. They will not jump through hoops for the amusement of casual readers. They will not temper their speech for prudish ears. I may not respond the way they do, but I respect them for what they are. And that’s where I draw the line.

    I wrote a book about people my grandmother would have spoken to, and they used words my father would have believed. A few people heard of it. Fewer read it. My closest friends bought it. And loaned it out. After a while the book disappeared from bookstores to make room for a best seller written by a man who had never met an adverb he didn’t like. It was about an oil-patch hooker who falls in love with a Soviet spy but turns him over to the CIA to save the Battleship Texas from being stolen by Sandinistas. When it comes to writing, hoers have it all over hoe hands.

    But I had already turned down the next row. Writing is a lot like chopping cotton. It’s a long way to the end of the row, and when you get there, there’s always another row to turn down. A friend was disturbed that I was spending so much time at something so unrewarding. “There’s no money in it,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. “There’s more fame in selling used cars. There’s more fun in running a gas pump.” I didn’t argue with him because he was right.

    I just kept chopping on down the row, knowing when I got to the end of it, there would be another row to turn down. And another. And another. And as the day wore on it wouldn’t get any easier. Maybe it wouldn’t get any better. Perhaps no one would come out to the field to see if I was still working. I might not even hear the dinner bell. It didn’t matter. He thought I was a hoer. But I am a hoe hand.

  • Responding to Trump’s Idiocies

    Responding to Trump’s Idiocies

    Participating in a public protest is always a kind of self-congratulatory performance even if you are perfectly sincere.

    You have picked a time and a place to do it — to coincide with other like-minded individuals. The impact of such an action is unclear. The actions of one person or even a group of people rarely cause great changes. Most of the time, the protest is seen by a limited number of people, and chances are, many were sympathetic to your cause anyway.

    Events like this have an element of zany fun — people are dressed in silly outfits, sometimes dancing or chanting silly slogans (at this particular event, the leader of the cheers was a long-haired lady wearing star-studded bluejeans and a cowboy hat). Apparently people dressed in frog outfits were arrested in a recent protest, so now people dressed in dinosaur or frog costumes have started popping up at events. Most people brought signs (most were hand-made). Some had simple messages (“We don’t do Kings,” “Due Process for Everyone,” “RESIST!” “No Kings, No ICE!” ). Some had longer, deeper messages (“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”).

    I talked to lots of people at the protest of all ages and ethnicities. Surprisingly, at least half of the attendees seemed to be over 50 years old. I met several grandmothers; one of them said, “I am here protesting for my grandchildren; they shouldn’t have to grow up in a society like this.” I met librarians, high school teachers, veterans, unemployed people concerned about the future. Most of the attendees showed a visceral dislike of Trump (several signs even had profanities directed towards him). Several mentioned the outrages of ICE; some mentioned Trump’s reckless foreign policy actions; my own sign referred to “Trump’s Idiocies,” and indeed, one woman held up a sign saying, “NO SIGN IS BIG ENOUGH TO LIST ALL THE REASONS I’M HERE”).

    I have seen political protests in my days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Europe. To protest corrupt pyramid schemes sanctioned by the Albanian government, my university students went on strike, held protests and even held hunger strikes. I’ve seen demonstrators arrested, and I have seen demonstrators retaliate against police forces trying to “control” their actions. Back in the 1990s, I thought my students in Ukraine and Albania were not politically engaged enough (even though they always had opinions about their country’s politics). Then suddenly they became engaged. To my surprise, in the 2000s, the unendingly corrupt Ukraine government faced street protests that became bigger and harder to ignore.

    Of course, Ukraine is in a volatile situation now (partially because of Trump’s unwillingness to uphold our NATO alliance or respond forcefully to outright aggressions). But the lesson of the Ukraine Maidan protests in the 2000s may be instructive and even hopeful. When talking to people at the protests, what I heard most from them was that Trump has gone too far, and that the tables are starting to turn. Maybe so, but the United States is a big messy place, elections are a long time from now, and the federal judicial system has been way too accommodating to Trump’s stalling tactics. In the meantime, Trump has continued defunding science, disarming regulatory agencies, demonizing political opponents, spreading misinformation and letting his underlings misuse the instruments of power.

    How do we respond? What can we do? I can’t say. But it was nice hearing the honking of car horns and the enthusiasm of car passengers for the signs and people they saw. It was also nice talking to people who felt just like me and felt just as exasperated and helpless. Sometimes you can watch the news reports and social media reports and convince yourself that politics is like a spectator event — like a boxing match or a circus. The bad news is that Trump and his gang are just going to get worse; they will continue to do more horrifying things, and it may take a long time for today’s leaders in the private sector and education to figure out how to overcome it. But it can be helpful to meet and talk with other people who feel the same way you do — and hear how they are coping.

    Robert Nagle at No Kings protest, October 2025
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  • Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Clay Reynolds (1949-2022): A Literary Appreciation

    Texas author Clay Reynolds was a literary giant who understood deeply what it meant to be a Texan. He was a great scholar of history and literature and also a dedicated teacher. His novels tackled all kinds of social issues of today and yesterday; they were populated with characters who could be lovely, offbeat or even detestable. But he could also find sympathetic and even heroic qualities in the most ordinary of people (such as with the Gil Hooley character in his novel Tentmaker). Reynolds pursued his art both brilliantly and relentlessly — and with humor and compassion. Reynold’s Texas stories reveal the complexity of character and the worlds they inhabited; these stories will be treasured for generations.

    By Robert Nagle, Blogger and Editor of Personville Press

    (Read my 10-part interview with Clay Reynolds, Wikipage article about Clay Reynolds, the author’s official home page and the obituary)

    At the end of this page is a list of the best Clay Reynolds books & essays to start off with. Several of Mr. Reynolds books were published as ebooks by Baen Books and are available on all major ebook stores. The official author page for Clay Reynolds contains lots of links to published essays and online articles. Several books (like Sandhill County Lines) are only available in print and can be bought on Amazon and other places. Sandhill County Lines is also an audiobook available on Audible and other places.

    Tony Daniel did an 80 minute interview with Reynolds for the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast.

    (Here is a 2017 reading Clay Reynolds gave where he tells a beautiful story about his father’s work as a railway man in a small Texas town).

    I came to know author Clay Reynolds during his last year of life. No, I never met the man or even talked to him on the phone, but we corresponded often over the last year about literary matters. We shared a few common friends on Facebook, and several years ago, after I noticed that there was no Wikipedia page about him, I offered to set one up for him (as I had done before for several Texas authors). It took more than a year for Mr. Reynolds to respond — at first, he was a bit suspicious, but he opened up a bit after learning that my Personville Press was named after a small town outside Dallas. Reynolds loved to write about small towns in Texas like Quanah, Texas where he grew up.

    As it turns out, Mr. Reynolds and I had many connections. Both of us passed through Trinity University (I had gotten my B.A. in 1988 and Reynolds had studied there as an undergraduate and received his master’s in 1974). By some miraculous coincidence, both of us took creative writing classes with playwright Eugene McKinney and were both ardent fans of the fiction of Robert Flynn (who taught fiction writing at Trinity and also used Texas as a backdrop for his fiction). As luck would have it, during the years I was at Trinity, Clay Reynolds had visited several times to give lectures about fiction — although strangely, I never knew about it at the time).

    Actually though, my first contact with Clay Reynolds came through book reviews he regularly wrote for the Houston Chronicle. Unbeknownst to me at the time, after my mom saw one of Reynolds’ book reviews in 1996, she bought the book and mailed it to me during me Peace Corps service in Albania. (That book happened to be Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson and was delightful).

    After Mr. Reynolds responded and I realized all the common connections, I suggested that in addition to writing the Wikipedia page article that I would like to interview him separately by email. Reynolds already had a long distinguished career in academia and publishing, and it was semi-scandalous that no Wikipedia page existed about him.

    Lone Star Literary Life had already done an in-depth interview with Mr. Reynolds in 2016, but it was clear that many more topics remained to be covered — and besides, Reynolds was the perfect interview subject because he would eagerly answer any question thrown at him. Indeed, purely as a pastime, Reynolds had answered over 1300 questions on the Quora.com website about history, culture, Texas, you name it. My email interview with Reynolds started in mid-January 2021 and ended in January 2022. The interview itself is about 45,000 words and will be released online on one of my websites by Summer, 2022.

    6 Interesting/Peculiar Things about Clay Reynolds

    He was loquacious about his own literary creations and the creative process itself. Many authors are reluctant to engage so openly in this kind of introspection. Not Reynolds. When Baen republished his titles as ebooks, he wrote 2 new prefaces — (one for Vox Populi, and one for Tentmaker — you can read them by clicking the Sample button on the book page to read it in a browser). Reynolds wrote a similar kind of preface essay for his Sandhill County Lines short story collection. He delivered an address about creativity and biography called “A Cow Can Moo” (PDF) . You get the point.

    Reynolds had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. (He actually received his undergraduate degree in history and wrote his doctorate on literary history (American Social Drama in the 1930s). Just for the hell of it, during his retirement he liked to answer random questions about history on Quora.com He answered 1300 questions (with his last answer about the price of horses in the USA just before the advent of the car). He rarely asked questions on quora.com except one –what was the asking price for the street price of raw opium in 1916? (now that he asked it, I am kind of curious about the answer!)

    Reynolds had a knack for writing about people with rough edges. Critic John Pitchfork remarked that one of the best features of Reynolds fiction is “the recurrent pattern of tongue-tied and not very bright good old Texas boys courting the mystery of beauty they cannot understand nor resist.” Sandhill County Lines has tough rednecks (“A better class of people”), vulgar frat boys (Mexico), domineering parents (“The Prodigal”). (Don’t worry, it also has lots of kind-hearted people as well). One of my fave stories is “Nickelby” about an adjunct English professor who moves next door to a mean-tempered man who mistreats his dog and how her desire to protect the dog forces a confrontation. Tentmaker is populated with outlaws, prostitutes and all sorts of misfits.

    Reynolds was a stickler about historical accuracy in his old Western novels. He spent about 2 years researching the 1992 novel Franklin’s Crossing and did all kinds of field research to learn about dress, weapons, transportation. He visited the archives of a Tennessee hotel to learn what kinds of dinner they served. In the BAEN interview, he said he assumed that everybody ate steak in the 1870s only to find out that almost nobody could eat beef because it couldn’t be preserved (in contrast to fish, pork, fowl, which could be). He had no idea how big wagons were during that time (and how much they could hold) or how to use a saddle with a 19th century tack. This research also shows in his later novel, Tentmaker. (2002)

    6 Clay Reynolds works to start off with

    Clay Reynolds has written a ton of stuff. I have read only a fraction of them, but I sorta know what most of them are about. There’s enough to keep a bookworm busy for years (if not decades). Here’s some tips about how to get started. You can buy DRM-free ebooks of these titles directly at the baen.com website and print copies and also buy them at the same price on Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Don’t be fooled by the lack of customer reviews of these books on Amazon. All are interesting and dramatic and beautiful.

    1. Of Snakes & sex & Playing in the Rain: Random Thoughts on Harmful Things (Baen 2013) This is a great and funny and poetic collection of personal essays about all sorts of topics ranging from “macho” topics (like trout fishing, golf, baseball, etc) to pop culture (Elvis, first dates, coffee, warning labels) to personal reflections about the legacy of long lost relatives. This is the perfect gift book for the I-Know-How-To-Read-But-I’d-never-be-caught-dead-reading-Proust-or-Faulkner-or-Morrison type of reader.

    2. The Vigil (1986) was his widely acclaimed first novel. It’s about a mother who loses her daughter in a Texas town. It received very positive reviews in the national press.

    3. Tentmaker (2012) is a historic novel about Gil Hooley, an ordinary fellow who travels to Texas in the late 19th century after his wife leaves him. He is (you guessed it) a tentmaker. After his wagon breaks down in the middle of nowhere, he decides to live in his tent. The novel is about the society which forms around him — including a brothel! — and how this emerging group tries to fend off various outlaws and calamities. The first chapter begins with a shocking and gruesome crime, and the rest of the novel alternates between the perspective of the outlaws and the various people trying to make a living around Hooley’s tent city. This novel was meticulously researched, has a lot of bawdy humor and does a great job of conjuring up what early settlements were like before they turned into actual towns. I love this book; as I said, the first few chapters are pretty gruesome, but it heads off into many unexpected directions.

    4. Sandhill County Lines (Stories) 2007 (No Ebook) If you can, try to listen to this audio book instead of reading it. Hearing captures the variety of dialects and speech patterns of various characters. My only “complaint” is that the stories are longer than the typical short story (ranging in the 15,000-25,000 word range). They feel almost like novellas. I love “Dogstar” which is about two state highway patrolmen investigating the death of a homeless man. The story “Bush League” is a great story about the love life of a talent scout for a professional baseball team. The opening story, “A Better Class of People” kind of appalled me when I first read it; it’s about rednecks who beat up some college students who happened to visit a bar one day. But when I heard it aloud on the audiobook, I really appreciated the subtle characterizations and gradual rise in dramatic tension. Also, the spoken dialogue is really masterful — simple, guttural, good at conveying anger and dread. (There’s no ebook edition of this collection, but the book is still in print and relatively cheap.)

    5. Ars Poetica: A Postmodern Parable (2003, Baen ebook, print book by Texas Review Press). No, I haven’t read it yet — so what do I know — but it’s an academic satire set in academic times about an aging poet in academia. Serious readers may groan at such books (hasn’t this subject been written to death? ) but I actually like the genre, and frankly Reynolds is precisely the type of author who is erudite and witty enough to pull it off. (Novelist George Garrett liked it a lot, and the novel eventually won a 2002 Texas Review literary prize.) I know 95% of readers may roll their eyes at the idea of reading another campus novel, but for fans of postmodern fiction and John Barth, this is our catnip.

    6. Vox Populi: Novel of the Common Man (2013) is basically a novel in stories in a much lighter and gentler vein. It shows how ordinary Texans interact with one another in various places: the flea market, the car wash, the lunch cafe; perhaps it lacks the melodrama or violence of the Sandhill stories, but it’s also a quirky, entertaining read. Texas Book Lover Michelle Newby Lancaster wrote a nice review of it (archived version), saying

    Clay Reynolds is uncannily skilled at rendering vignettes of strangers forced to occupy the same physical space. He is an astute observer of our smallest gestures and expressions and his dialogue is spot-on, complete with malapropisms that had me laughing aloud. His physical descriptions are detailed to an impressive degree. I could picture these people standing in front of me, to the last vivid detail. At the beginning of Vox, the nameless but not-quite-anonymous narrator seems to be a rather dull blank slate with no personality of his own and at the mercy of the seemingly stronger personalities surrounding him. As the sketches progress, though, our narrator begins to slowly but surely engage more substantively, confidently and empathetically – which is to say, successfully. It is a subtle performance. 

    Others? I confess that I have not read a lot of the other novels except maybe the blurbs. If you feel strongly about a novel, feel free to make a case for it in the comment section!

    Essays to Read Online

    Clay Reynolds has been diligent about publishing his essays, book reviews and academic articles online. (Really his website is full of great stuff). A lot of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s have not been digitized, but there are PDFs of some of his more interesting essays available.

    TV Pandemic Log II (2020-2022). (PDF) During COVID, Reynolds watched a lot of movies and TV shows (as did all of us). He kept an idiosyncratic journal of everything he watched, assigning it a score and giving it a capsule review. He watched stuff from almost all the streaming services (and noted which service they’re on– helpful! ) He watched an awful lot of mysteries and historical dramas — and was very critical about series that didn’t quite get the history right.

    Reaching the Summit: A Confession and a Valediction (PDF) (published in 2016) is one of Clay Reynolds’ most philosophical (and yes somber) essays. It’s about retirement and confronting the fact that the attainment of his intellectual and literary goals still leaves him unsatisfied.

    Bookish Topics: Literary Worth and Popular Tastes (2000) describes how the struggle between popular fiction and literary fiction has always been with us.

    Various Articles about College Life: Sexual Harassment and the Academy (1995). Long exploration of the legal and practical difficulties in trying to protect the rights of the victims and accused. The Real Crisis of Higher Education (2006) how the increasing cost plus lower standards are undermining the overall value of a college education. Trigger Warnings (2015) about the recent trend toward warning college students in advance about potentially disturbing texts. U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy (2001) how Internet and technology is changing the way students learn. Campus
    Carry offers no benefit while increasing risks (2021)     Reynolds signs up for a gun safety class and concludes that the Texas law to allow students to bring guns on campus will make no difference.

    Homage to “Mad Magazine” (2019) and how it affected a boy living in a small Texas town.

    History of a campaign that failed: The story of Sarah Palin, former Governator of a Really Big state, told by Clay Reynolds. (Satire) (PDF) October 2009. Sarah Palin was an easy target of satire; Reynolds took it to an entirely different plane by writing a monologue diatribe using Sarah Palin’s peculiar form of speaking. It perhaps is longer than it needs to be, but Reynolds had a great ear for speech patterns.

    From Castro to Cancun (2014). (PDF) Reynolds offered an eyewitness account of visiting Cuba at about the time that the Obama Administration loosened rules on travelling to that country. He said he enjoyed seeing the vintage cars on the road and thought the place was relatively free — though he felt certain that Cuba’s unique culture would soon be Americanized.

    Happy Reading!


  • New Web Address: Lennin Repizo Barber & Beauty Salon

    The new website for Lennin Repizo is at https://www.lenninrepizo.com/ Lennin Repizo is a hair stylist in Katy Texas. I should know — he is my barber!

    I noticed the other day that they changed their web address, but Google hasn’t figured it yet (even though Bing and Yahoo seem to have figured it out. The name of the company is Lennin Repizo Barber & Beauty Salon, but it also is known as Lennin Beauty Salon.

    For the record, Mr. Repizo is a gentleman from Venezuela who is a terrific hair stylist and always does a great job on my hair. (I have been using his service for 2 years). The hair salon usually has the appointment calendar so you know what times are free.

    Silly Google and Chrome, why can’t you figure out what the new address is? Google used to give a lot of SEO juice to blogs, but over time, that power has declined precipitously. But it probably already knows that my home page updates frequently, that the site has been around for more than 20 years and that it is not a purveyor of spam. So maybe this will hurry up the process; I will post updates.

    • 12 hours later. This page appears nowhere on Google, #7 on Bing, #6 on DuckDuckGo and #4 on yahoo (which is powered by bing). This blog link appears nowhere on Google, and the corrected domain appears at about the #30 search result (this comes from both when I’m logged into google and not). So apparently I wildly overestimated the influence of my blog on google.
    • 5 days later. Apparently Google has accepted my edit for the Google business name, but even when I type in the owner’s name, the lenninrepizo domain is still buried on page 3. Instead we have the previous domain and all sorts of catalogue sites and social media. This blog post is absolutely nowhere to be found. The results are much more interesting on Bing, where Lenninrepizo.com is on the top, and this post is positioned as #4. On duckduckgo, the results are even stranger. #1 is a random post on my blog unrelated to this post. #2 is the corrected revised domain (along with 3,4,5) while 6 goes to this post. Curiously, Bing and duckduckgo seem to take summary from random post sentences, while the blog excerpt seems to appear only on Google.

    One week later, it appears that BING provides the most accurate results, duckduckgo provides the 2nd most accurate and Google provides the least accurate — though to be fair, the Google business info now lists the correct domain after I made a suggested edit. Interestingly, I thought that manually adding an entry for the hair salon as a customer to yelp would improve search prominence, but apparently that doesn’t make a difference. Finally, it’s interesting that the public Instagram page for the hair stylist appears as the #1 result on Google search, followed by Facebook. I conclude that Google is giving a lot of Google juice to social networks — and in a way, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have to validate the identity of businesses, though not necessarily individuals.

  • Macmillan vs. Harris County Library (and every other public library).

    You may have already heard about how libraries really dislike the new pricing model of MacMillan’s publishing company.

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  • Time's Person of the Year should be "Reality Winner"

    Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019 should be Dallas woman Reality Winner.

    Reality Winner (yes, that’s her real name which was given at birth) served in the Air Force and was a multilingual American intelligence specialist who did her job well. Her Wikipedia page states that she learned Arabic, Dari and Pashtun to provide humanitarian aid to women and children in Afganistan. She frequently made donations to the Syrian human rights group White Helmets and Toys for Tots charity.

    Reality Winner’s “Crime” (aka, Truth)

    In 2017 she printed a copy of a document detailing the extent of Russian attempts to hack into US voting machines and spearphish emails to election officials before the November 2016 election. She shared it with the Intercept; it was important because it provided evidence to the public that Russian interference in the election was real and far more widespread than we could have suspected. Also, it occurred much later in the election than previously revealed. At the time it sent shockwaves throughout the media. Maybe this would eventually come out anyway in its own time (thanks to journalists). But at the time, this was fresh information.

    As it happens, Reality was caught and immediately jailed. She was charged with “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.” She was arrested without receiving her Miranda rights and then denied bail. Because the case involved national security, it was hard to offer a defense without being able to refer to secret methods and information. One article describes the difficulty:

    Additionally, the government claimed they had subject matter experts who concluded Winner’s “unauthorized disclosure caused exceptionally grave harm” to “national security.”

    “If you look at the brief of the transcript in the detention hearings, that was explicitly used by the government to justify her being detained,” Nichols contended. “Because their argument is, well, because this caused grave and exceptional damage. If you let her out, she could do it again and thus cause more grave and exceptional damage. Again, that’s the buzzwords the government used.”

    “You don’t have to prove the grave exceptional damage. You just have to put someone on the stand who will say, yes, it did cause grave and exceptional damage. And then the issue is, can you give us more detail?”

    Prosecutors answer, “That’s classified. That’s highly classified,” Nichols said. “So it’s this circuitous argument that unfortunately that’s the way the Espionage Act is setup.”

    At no point in the course of the case did the government have to publicly outline what constituted “exceptionally grave damage.” They even insisted they did not have to prove damage occurred, as they used the allegation to inflict further punishment upon Winner in detention hearings.

    Prosecutors found some absurd and off-handed remarks Winner made about Osama bin Laden to deny her bail. As the defense attorney says in the same article, “There’s a reason why you can’t say certain things in front of the jury. Because if you say, hey, this person kicks puppies and burns down orphanages and then you come back and say, my mistake. That was somebody else. You can’t unring that bell.”

    Another problem is that the Espionage Act is outdated and doesn’t have provisions to allow whistleblowers to explain why they performed the act they did. As the Standwithreality website explains:

    The vague language of the Espionage Act makes it ripe for abuse, making it a potential weapon against both whistleblowers as well as news outlets that publish leaked documents. 

    Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?

    Eventually a plea bargain of 5 years and 3 months was agreed to, and now Reality Winner sits in a Fort Worth federal prison.

    But wait, that seems steep for this kind of crime. Reality didn’t really harm anybody except in a hypothetical sense. Her actions helped Americans to understand the extent of Russian involvement and was done purely for selfless motives. Reality Winner did not expect to become famous or make a lot of money. She just wanted the truth to come out.

    I really can’t speculate about the extent of the damage to sources and methods. Perhaps I am not privy to certain details. But if you read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s book, Secrecy, you will see how throughout US history, falsehoods were often hidden under the veil of secrecy.  “Secrecy is for losers,” the book said. “[It’s] for people who do not know how important the information really is.” Publicly available information and news reports can be vetted and challenged and confirmed, while classified intelligence briefs rarely undergo the same skeptical rigor. This sort of history convinces me that secrecy is much more harmful to US interests than disclosures.

    I can’t speculate on Winner’s intent, but the disclosure was only one 5 page document which referred to a past series of events. In a way, the Obama had released a summary with the same conclusions in December 2016, and while this document shares more detail, these technical details don’t really hurt national security (other to say that the federal government hires security contractors who can do competent forensic analyses).

    Winner agreed to the plea bargaining mainly because the Espionage Act left her with a crappy hand. But this sentence was unduly punitive and more geared to setting an example (than matching the punishment with the crime).

    Therefore Reality Winner would be a perfect case for clemency. She served her time already; the government made their point clearly. Now it’s time to set her free. Really, that decision is up to Donald Trump.

    Why is Donald Trump doing nothing about this?

    A simple executive order could correct this injustice.

    Believe me, I get it that Trump has little reason to intervene. He doesn’t really care about cases unless they improve his standing with his base — and frankly, Trump’s base could care less about Winner. Releasing Winner won’t really help Trump politically or financially, and so Trump will ignore her.

    Trump bears considerable animus towards the press. But wait — this case doesn’t really hurt Trump except insofar as it implicates the Russians even more.

    But Trump has intervened in many cases where the person was less deserving:

    • Trump pardoned Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, despite his long record of targeting immigrants and disobeying lots of local and federal court orders.
    • Trump pardoned Michael Behanna for killing an Iraqi man who he had taken in custody. A military court found him guilty of “unpremeditated murder in a combat zone” and sentenced him for 25 years.
    • Trump pardoned Derrick Miller who was sentenced to life (with a chance of parole) for the premeditated murder of an Afghan civilian during a battlefield interrogation.
    • Trump pardoned Clint Lorance who was court-martialed and sentenced to 19 years for murdering two civilians in Afghanistan.
    • Trump reversed a demotion of Eddie Gallagher who was involved in the killing of an Iraqi and (according to various news sources cited on Wikipedia), allegedly took “random shots” into buildings, shooting and killing an unarmed old man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls. After Gallagher mortally wounded the prisoner, he was eventually exonerated simply because the medic decided to expedite the prisoner’s death simply as an act of mercy. (Gallagher was later convicted of posing with the corpse ).

    I would not want to be in the same room as any of the people Trump picked as worthy of clemency. Perhaps it is belaboring the point to add that many of Trump’s inner circle (Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates and Roger Stone) committed serious federal crimes of moral turpitude. Suffice to say that Trump is perfectly comfortable working with people who have bent the rules to suit the occasion. You can’t set one standard for Reality Winner and another standard for people who in some cases have actually compromised security interests.

    What would you do?

    For a while, let’s leave aside the question of whether Reality Winner is being scapegoated here. Let’s remember that Chelsea Manning released a lot of (embarrassing but not secret) diplomatic cables to Wikipedia and Edward Snowden released a tremendous amount of top secret NSA docs revealing aspects to the US surveillance apparatus. There are others. Manning was sentenced to 7 years, but it was reduced to 3 years. Snowden lives in Russia and never has returned.

    What are some common threads here? All 3 were very young when they took action. All thought it was the public interest for Americans to know what they learned at their job. All knew that disclosing was a risk and they would potentially face legal consequences. Snowden and Reality Winner were government contractors and put in a situation where they couldn’t really use a protected whistleblower status to complain. Manning saw video footage of US troops killing indiscriminately; Snowden saw tools which allowed all kinds of surveillance which seemed at odd with American values. Reality Winner saw shocking information indicating that Russian spying had not declined after Obama’s warning but was in fact continuing. She decided that Americans needed to know.

    Part of the problem is that an underling lacks the power to determine what should be secret and public. It would be crazy to allow people on the bottom rungs of sensitive positions to disclose whatever they want. Protocol needs to be followed.

    On the other hand, a bureaucracy which depends on workers staying quiet about everything is doomed to leak eventually. Workers at such organizations need to believe in the mission, and all three people were disillusioned in some way. A lot of this disillusionment stemmed from the contrast between professed and actual American political values. Possibly they were just young and naive.

    Manning and Winner paid a price for their actions. But of course they knew these risks although maybe they didn’t appreciate the full consequences.

    Perhaps you could make the argument that Snowden revealed too much about existing programs, and these revelations threatened the ability of the NSA to do work. But this is not true of Winner because the only thing she revealed was past actions made by a foreign country.

    I want there to be more Reality Winners in our country. And that is why I want her freed. Yes, it’s kind of hilarious that a woman who was actually given this name at birth was imprisoned for being too in touch with the ugly reality of the global threat.

    But Reality Winner has been punished enough. It is time to let her go. Keeping Winner is prison is essentially saying that Americans should never have to confront the ugly realities locked away behind closed doors. Reality’s heroism is recognizing that sometimes you have to break the rules when it’s the only way Americans can learn certain vital facts.

    On this Winner has already succeeded.

    MORE:

    Will Bunch has a long juicy column about this:

    Winner’s leak had immediate, tangible results. On the day after the story was published in The Intercept, a federal agency — the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — sent out a bulletin to state officials warning about the security issues that had been disclosed. A number of state and local officials said they hadn’t been warned about this specific Russian threat and that in fact the Winner disclosure was the first they’d heard of it. Perhaps more importantly, her blown whistle put new pressure on Washington to investigate a problem that Team Trump and its allies on Capitol Hill wanted to disappear.

    The result was last week’s stunning report on Russian election interference from the Senate Intelligence Committee, a GOP-led panel. It revealed for the first time that the Russian 2016 operation targeted election systems in all 50 states, that hackers had the ability to change key data in Illinois and that, in the words of the New York Times, this was “an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.”

    That lack of either acknowledgment or detection is precisely the reason that Reality Winner risked everything to blow the whistle.

    As blogger Marcy Wheeler pointed out last week, it took both the Winner leak and subsequent prodding from Democratic members of Congress for either VR Systems or the FBI to take Russia’s apparent 2016 computer break-in of that vendor’s software seriously. Investigative efforts by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, revealed that despite some back-and-forth between VR Systems and the FBI before the 2016 general election, the vendor didn’t hire a contractor — FireEye — to investigate until after Winner’s disclosure (and, thus, long after the election).

    December 5, 2021 Update. Reality Winner did an interview with 60 minutes. She’s still under house arrest, but finally had an opportunity to speak her mind. Among the more interesting revelations: Winner felt that this disclosure did not reveal any of the federal government’s methods and procedures for spying.

  • Climate Change Forum — CCL Katy (Mon Jan 6)

    This page contains information about the nonpartisan CCL Climate Change Candidate Forum which is sponsored by the Katy chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby on Monday January 6. This event is free & open to the public, and all congressional candidates from TX7, TX10 and TX22 are invited to attend or send a campaign representative. Because the event (and the CCL organization itself) is nonpartisan, candidates from both parties are welcome to participate. This page will be updated with more information over time.

    Climate Forum Topic: What new federal measures would best help communities transition to a low carbon future more quickly?

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  • Notes on Climate Change

    Here are some notes for a presentation I prepared about climate change and Texas in November, 2019.

    Link to the Slides (On Google Docs) — Here’s the PDF.

    Climatebrief.org — climate change news, comparing policies, etc.

    Climate change impacts on Texas.

    My Climate Change Worksheet — I prepared this in 2014 (and updated in 2016) , but most of the data is still basically correct — or worse!

    Interactive Comparing impacts of 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, 4 degrees

    Article: Do we really have only 12 years to fight climate change?

    Atrisk.org report about Texas risk and preparation; (PDF of full report)

    Texas Climate News. A local news site about climate change and Texas.

    CNN Climate Change Quiz

    Amazing Video Talk (30 Minutes): Environmental Engineer by Mark Jacobson. 2018 Keynote Presentation. View the slides! View the peer-reviewed paper his research appears in!

    2 Bills to Solve Climate Change:

    Here’s a list of my favorite books of climate change.

    Link Shortcut: http://bit.ly/36Z4UVF

    Here’s a comparison of the two leading plans. HR 763 is the CCL plan (leaning Dem). Climate Leadership Plan has a lot of support from GOP).

  • Health care in Houston (2018)

    A month ago the HHS-commissioned Health of Houston Survey issued its 2018 report. Unfortunately the key information is locked up in a PDF. So I made screenshots of the most interesting charts:

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  • Audio Interview with Texas Author Robert Flynn

    Here’s my 2007 interview with Texas novelist Robert Flynn. All this information is at archive.org, but here’s a complete description:

    0:00 Introduction
    1:12 Current projects
    2:55 Writing Habits
    4:33 Writing For Practice?
    6:10 Writing nonfiction vs. Fiction
    7:18 Hardest Book To Write? Easiest?
    8:30 Tie Fast Country: TV & Getting Inspiration From Rural Life
    12:10 Rereading Old stuff
    13:00 Thoughts on Audio Books
    16:00 Is it harder to write as you get older?
    16:40 Thoughts about genre & collaboration working with editors
    21:44 Writer and Family Life
    23:15 Reactions to “Wanderer Springs”
    23:40 Is it important that fiction be accessible to an audience?
    26:50 Books that Influenced Me while growing up. Small town libraries
    28:00 Developing as a young writer. Father’s influence.
    31:20 Characteristics of Texas writing and writers
    33:45 Traveling and seeing the world
    34:20 Thoughts about teaching students and how it changed my writing
    35:20 Principles/Secrets of Writing
    36:10 Tips for New Writers
    37:30 Identifying with my characters; small town stories
    40:00 Writers that Influence Me

    Robert Flynn is a Texas author born in Chillicothe, Texas in 1932. In his novels he writes about Texas traditions and myths, the clash between rural and city life, God and Christianity in a forlorn (and often violent) world. With his first book “North to Yesterday” he tackled the legends of the Texas cowboy and in his later works (Jade & Jade the Law, both set in early Texas) he continues writing in the Western genre, but with an eye towards understanding the nature of violence, justice, redemption and reconciliation. Robert Flynn is the author of 17 books, including Jade: Outlaw, The Last Klick, and North to Yesterday, and a two-part documentary for ABC-TV as well as a fellow at the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the recipient of a Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award, two Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, and two Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.

    QUOTE: “You can read any book on writing fiction for example, and they will tell you the same thing. Someone may say it in a different way that gives you better insight, but there are no secrets in writing; it’s just a matter of doing it.”

    Wikipedia page and author website

    Remarks.

    At college I took creative writing classes with Flynn. In the classroom he seemed laid back and didn’t analyze stories too deeply; on the other hand, he had an intuitive sense of what a story wanted to do. After graduating from Trinity, I participated in fiction workshops with 3 seasoned authors (John Barth, J.M. Coetzee and Stephen Dixon) at graduate school. Don’t get me wrong, it was a thrill to work with accomplished authors (and read their fiction). On the other hand, I have ended up reading several works by Flynn for various reasons (possibly out of personal loyalty more than anything else). I have come to appreciate the understated artistry of his stories and his embrace of the Western genre which almost grates at my postmodern sensibility. (I reviewed one of his works for a college literary magazine and reviewed two other titles: Tie-Fast Country and Jade: The Outlaw).

    Reading these works made me realize that Flynn was a lot more contemporary and politically engaged than I’d imagined. To my surprise I learned that Flynn wrote a lot of political stuff (mainly nonfiction) on Facebook and his blog.

    Flynn belongs to the same generation as my other literary idol Jack Matthews. There are parallels. Both had slight successes in the national publishing world, but continued to churn out quality fiction for decades while teaching at universities and remaining “best kept literary secrets” in their respective regions. I must confess feeling envy that the two of them found career paths in academia; (these opportunities seemed to have disappeared after I graduated). On the other hand, my generation did pretty well during the Internet boom and New Media; plus we had access to blogs and self-publishing, so I guess it all evens out (sort of).

    Both fiction writers transcend place in their fiction; on the other hand, both seemed to embrace provincialism and find inspiration in the past. Also, there is something to be said for longevity in the writing world. I’ve seen many remarkable writers write one or two great things and then disappear from the book world. It’s as though they were disappointed by the lack of attention and praise, and just decided not to do it anymore. Just writing one great thing (regardless of commercial success) is a major accomplishment. But if you can sustain a lifelong commitment to storytelling, that also is a remarkable thing. Often it means experimenting with different genres and characters and themes. Even if everything isn’t original or transcendentally beautiful, at least you can say that you have covered a lot of ground.

    I had fun interviewing Mr. Flynn (he’s an old friend). I also had fun recording some audio interviews with Jack Matthews (and links to the published videos will appear soon). I’ve heard a lot of literary interviews in my life, so I have high standards. Although the final product is great, I realize that I was a lousy interviewer. I wanted to think of challenging and profound questions of art and craft. But even the most brilliant of people can’t think of brilliant answers on the spot, and even if they do, it’s punctuated by umms and ahhs. (I removed them all for this interview, you’re welcome). Also, I realized that I forgot to ask a lot of obvious questions. Like:

    1. Tell me about your first book (and second). etc.
    2. If you remember, tell me about how you wrote book 1, book 2, etc. What was the hardest part? What are you most proud of?
    3. Why did you write Book 1, Book 2? Was anything going on in your life?

    If you get a degree in literature, you learn that these biographical questions are not supposed to be that interesting or important. On the other hand, if you have the writer in front of a microphone, why not ask these questions? The worst that can happen is that they refuse to answer!

    Through careful editing I can shorten my questions and editorial asides. Frankly I really tried to steer the interview to things which mattered to me. But frankly, who cares about my opinion about how the question should be answered?

    One of my most challenging interviews was also one of my best. (It was written, not audio). I interviewed my best friend — the brilliant San Antonio literary critic Michael Barrett. He was only half-motivated to participate — and only after a lot of prodding. In fact, he refused to answer a certain percent of my questions and intentionally gave boring answers sometimes. We played a game where I would ask one or two questions a day and then give a follow up question on the next day.

    I asked long-winded questions on the assumption that it would give him different ways to answer. Often he responded in the opposite manner I anticipated. Keep in mind that on his movie criticism and facebook posts, he gives all sorts of witty and comprehensive answers. Eventually I figured out that while Barrett is adept at addressing aesthetic questions, it’s futile to ask them in the abstract. It’s much better to ask questions that tap into his encyclopedic knowledge of movies. Just a few weeks ago, I asked them to recommend some Irish movies, and he gave me an exhaustive annotated list. (His lists are famous — and in fact I have put them in a text file which I am not providing a hyperlink for:
    https://www.personvillepress.com/private8/mike-list.txt )

    Literary interviews are hard to do — although an entertaining writer can make anything interesting. The written Paris Review interviews are the gold standard of course, and I think you can say that the Bill Moyers interviews are outstanding as well — even though he usually comes to them with a political or cultural agenda (and that’s not really a bad thing). Don Swaim used to do a 5-7 minute Bookbeat interview segment for CBS Radio, but a decade ago, he released many of the full unexpurgated interviews online (they were taken offline, but direct links are still available on the right sidebar of this page). These uncensored interviews are extraordinarily fun and revealing.

    I don’t keep up with literary podcasting as much as I should, but when I was following these things, the best interviewer was Michael Silverblatt of KCRW Bookworm. What an extremely high-brow interviewer! That said, I had two complaints with Bookworm: 1)Silverblatt asked unnecessarily cerebral questions and 2)he was interviewing only authors from the big publishing houses.

    At one time I would find Silverblatt’s challenging questions to be interesting. But authors aren’t especially known for their critical pronouncements. You wouldn’t expect Don Swaim’s interviews with Ray Bradbury or P.D. James or James Michener to uncover profound insights about literature; on the other hand, you’d expect to have a lot of fun. Even though Silberblatt is a fascinating person and critic, I find that the conversations drift away from the author and towards Silverblatt’s verbalizing of his readerly responses.

    Let me be clear. Silverblatt is a great reader and critic (and interviewer). Also, he is responding to the fact that many writers are reticent or reluctant to talk about their own works. But his critical perspective often overshadows the author’s voice even if it is what gives his podcast a personal touch. Let’s say you were an author invited on a show hosted by a feminist or Marxist critic. You would not exactly be shocked to find that the discussion is being directed in a certain way even though you might not have given a second thought about social classes or Hegelian dialectic.

    On the other hand, an author is trying to speak to a variety of readers — not merely one perceptive critic. As great as it can be to face a perceptive/enthusiastic reader, an author also is trying to reach many different kinds of readers (and nonreaders!)

    Audio interviews are a convenient necessity — a painless way to learn how authors sound and talk. (Perhaps it’s important; perhaps it’s not). While listening to the Flynn interview, I was struck by how soft-spoken Flynn is — even in a profession known for soft-spoken people. That is interesting information to me — and perhaps to a listener as well.

    Here are some great Bookworm interviews: Otessa Moshfegh , Susan Sontag, Lydia Davis.

  • Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Dear Senator Cornyn,

    Friday, you said on the floor of the US Senate: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    To my knowledge, it is not illegal for people to be paid to protest. I know that lobbyists are paid to make their opinion known to you. I know that political organizations provide grants and scholarships for research and opinion pieces. I also know that the overwhelming majority of people who participate in rallies are doing it not primarily for financial reasons but to express their political values. I’m generally fine with that. I know many people who protest without receiving any form of compensation. I also know that political activism is often organized by political groups, which requires some expenses (for signs, etc.) From my limited experience, I know that large donors have deep pockets, while the smaller organizations they support are often run on very little money. And the volunteers they solicit are certainly not paid at all (except through T-shirts and buttons and that sort of thing).

    Referring specifically to the Kavanaugh protests, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of protesters were not paid in any fashion. I have googled around and I have seen no supporting information about this claim (except for a gofundme set up to help defray Ms. Blasey Ford’s expenses — which seems reasonable under the circumstances).

    Yet you feel comfortable making this poisonous claim without evidence.

    Recently, I saw the above  photo which is hilarious/disturbing on so many levels.

    First, the men outnumber the women here! Second, these signs weren’t hand made; somebody paid for the t-shirts, signs and even the bus. Update: The 501(c)(3) “Concerned Women For America” which has a 2 score on Charity Navigator, is funded by the Koch Brothers network including Freedom Partners, the Center To Protect Patient Rights, Tc4 Trust, and DonorsTrust. (Source).

    Personally, I’m more bothered by these polite but well-funded activists  funded by fossil fuel billionaires than the rowdy people who probably had minimal access to this kind of funding.

    I have never voted for you, but it so happens that you and I both graduated from Trinity University (which I was able to attend only because of an academic scholarship).

    In early 2004, after a Republican Administration supported by you launched a needless war in Iraq on the flimsiest of evidence, there was a Trinity alumni event which both you and I attended. It was an event intended to help new alumni to do job networking. Your appearance was added to the agenda at the last minute.

    I’m guessing that at least half of the Trinity alumns attending had no idea that you were coming — much less who you were. Yet I certainly looked forward to the opportunity to shake your hand and express in a minute or so my concerns about what the US was doing in Iraq.

    As you know, some Trinity alumni are politically-minded, but we are generally middle of the road and follow a certain decorum at alumni functions. It was extremely unlikely for anyone to turn it into a protest or shouting match.

    To my dismay, when you showed up at the event (where 100 alumni already were present at), you promptly moved to a part of the house which prevented people from talking to you.  Talking to you was not the MAIN reason I was there, but I kept an eye out for an opportunity to have a minute of your time. This event was for job networking — talking to strangers for 1 or 2 minutes was PRECISELY THE POINT of this event.

    As far as I know, during that event, you talked to NOBODY. You didn’t shake  hands with anyone but the event’s organizer; all you did was come up to the front when you were introduced. 

    At that point, you talked for 4-5 minutes about returning from a trip you had just made to Iraq and what great things the US government was doing there. You talked about how proud we should be of US soldiers in Iraq. At that point, you left.

    Your hasty departure left me speechless. Was the whole point of your visit to lecture Trinity alumni about how great the war effort was?

    Perhaps on that particular day you were feeling unwell, or had personal business to attend to. But  I was always struck by your rushed exit.  You didn’t even make a minimal effort to meet with and talk to people who basically had no axe to grind or message to deliver. Trinity alumni are not necessarily representative of   Texas demographics; to be frank, many are affluent and Republican-leaning. Yet I was a loss to understand why you were so unwilling to talk to any of them. Do you treat your constituents merely as people to lecture at rather than to listen to?

    Personally I’m outraged about the Kavanaugh hearings for a variety of reasons.

    First, on substantive grounds I thought Kavanaugh’s rulings on environmental cases was crazy and dangerous. I was concerned that Kavanaugh was involved in numerous partisan activities that was unbecoming for a judge.

    Second, I think the Senate and White House blocked the releases of a lot of records related to Kavanaugh’s past.

    Third, I thought Kavanaugh’s testimony about the accusations was belligerent and immoderate; some of his answers bordered on the risible.  This is not the desired temperament for a Supreme Court justice.

    Fourth, the way the Senate and White House attacked the accusers was pretty awful. I thought Ms. Swetnick’s claims were very credible. Even if they didn’t implicate Kavanaugh directly, they came from one of many eyewitnesses who say that Mr. Kavanaugh engaged in a considerable amount of drinking and boorish behavior in high school and college. They suggest a pattern of youthful behavior which I found disturbing. I am Kavanaugh’s age and like him attended  an all-boys Jesuit high school  — and yet I never drank. Most of the smart and responsible people I knew at Strake Jesuit in Houston rarely or never drank. As much as I would like to say that people outgrow their excesses of high school and college, I have to wonder whether Mr. Kavanaugh has properly owned up to his past and whether other  judges with less excessive pasts are out there.

    Fifth, I was really disturbed by the way  Senate Republicans released sensitive sexual history information of Ms. Swetnick, a witness who made a very serious claim about Kavanaugh’s behavior in high school. The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic violence condemned this practice: 

    We are appalled and outraged that the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership has released a statement about comments of a sexual nature allegedly made by Julie Swetnick. Such a statement is unacceptable in all events, but particularly because it attempts to smear someone who has not had the opportunity to be interviewed by the FBI. The release of this statement violates the intent of the Rape Shield Rule drafted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 and voted into law by Congress in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. This federal rule is meant to safeguard the victim against the invasion of privacy, potential embarrassment and sexual stereotyping that is associated with public disclosure of intimate sexual details and the infusion of sexual innuendo into the factfinding process. The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted this statement on its website, in violation of the spirit of its own Rule.

    In a sworn statement, Ms. Swetnick states she was sexually assaulted. Yet to date, she has not been interviewed by the FBI. Nevertheless, Senate leadership has engaged in a no-holds-barred personal attack on her. It is not unusual for a survivor to describe an experience of sexual violence in ways that do not reveal the full reality of the experience or to try and normalize the experience. However, even aside from these very common reactions, it is unthinkable that the Senate Judiciary Committee would have released this statement publicly and attacked her in this way.

    I have written you in the past about climate change and health care and possibly other issues. In general, your position have upheld corporate interests and showed a lack of concern for the underclass.

    Perhaps you have been listening to the wrong kinds of people.

    Robert Nagle is a Houston writer and blogger who dreams one day of being paid to protest — or  being paid in general.  He runs the ebook press, Personville Press. 

    Update 1. Washington Post debunks the nation perpetrated by Trump and others that Soros is bankrolling Kavanaugh protesters. 

  • Cool new hair stylist in Houston

    I just wanted to recommend a Houston hair stylist named Dori .  She lives and  works around the Houston area. She has done jobs on friends and yes even on my own hair. She performs a variety of personal services  and can even do these things in the privacy of your home. And yes, that is my photo on her home page!

  • A very odd thing about me and Houston

    While coming home I realized a very curious thing: in the 2000+ posts I have made here, next to none have been about Houston, the city where I live. I have lots of opinions about Houston and know a lot of people here from all wakes of life; how surprising that it would never occur to me to write about them!

    In a way it is not surprising; I have always  viewed Houston as a generic kind of  city and besides this blog is better at recording random observations and cogitations. But perhaps that is not true at all. After all, a large metropolitan city can be viewed in millions of different ways. It is also always changing;  anything you say about the city will go almost immediately out of date. I know that photo-bloggers and arts critics often captured the spirit of a city better than the local newspapers do. Anyway, the depressing thing about the local paper (the Houston Chronicle) is that it is really an international media property (of which the Chronicle is one prize jewel).  I jokingly have threatened to write a screenplay to vent my rage about Houston, and I still vow to do so, though it is still officially a back burner project.

    So I will try to write about the other Houston, the Houston that rarely makes it into the newspaper because it is simply the Houston that envelopes my life.

    Stay tuned. And p.s. don’t eat tortillas which are made of both flour and corn. What a monstrosity to the tastebuds!

  • BREAKING NEWS: Texas is NOT an Economic Paradise

    You may have seen Tyler Cowen’s cover story about Texas (discussed on his Marginal Revolution blog).

    I’m sure  I see these kinds of articles regularly (Economist had a cover story a few years ago about California vs. Texas).   They annoy me because they are one-dimensional. I think they compare it to California or NY  — which probably is burdened by more paperwork  and has a state income tax. But overall, California and NY and Mass provide a lot more startups than Texas, and Texas doesn’t innovate a whole lot (except for medical, which they do pretty well in). Probably the best known non-fossil fuel  business to come from Texas is Dell, but Dell has always taken pride in NOT innovating but simply running a more efficient suply chain.

    1. Texas acquired their wealth through ample land and  mineral depletion. Many local economies are  still dependent on defense and oil and gas. These are ephemeral signs of wealth.
    2. Texas is VERY vulnerable to climate change, and per capita CO2 emissions are very high. Its pollution is also very high; the whole state would be a smokestack were it not for the federal Clean Air Act.
    3. Texas has pitiful social services, and its safety net is abysmal.  Many people fall through the cracks. Also, we have a significant underground economy from undocumented workers. Who knows? That probably means that the GDP of Texas is bigger than estimated, but the important point is that they operate on the outskirts of  the law (minus worker protections, etc.)
    4. Lack of zoning (I assume he’s talking about Houston only) has some consequences. It becomes impossible to do any urban planning, and as a result mass transit is practically impossible. From that you become a car-dependent city with all sorts of social stratifications.
    5. A lot of companies choose Houston or Dallas as their headquarters, but I think it has to do with low taxes and low real estate than anything else.  Many companies assume that they can find workers from other cities or out-of-state to work for their jobs.
    6. One thing rarely mentioned in talk about Texas is commute times. I have never seen such a high percentage of workers (in Houston and  elsewhere)  be willing to spend an hour or more commuting each way to work every day.
    7. Texas does have cheap college tuition options, but secondary schools have a great deal of inequality which almost makes that point moot.
    8. Texas does have a lot of cultural dogmatism. Remember, 76% of Texas voters voted to ban gay marriage.  It is absolutely suffocating to any educated person (even in a “liberal bastion” like Houston).
    9. Texas has a very fickle judicial system. Election of judges, “tort reform” and political influences on judges.
    10. Housing prices are relatively cheap because land is plentiful; what else is new? Significantly, the biggest political contributors to the state GOP  have been housing developers; as a result, you have homeowners without  much legal recourse in the event of disputes.
    11. One reason innovation is fairly lacking in Texas is the mediocre education system for a state its size. We have a lot of big companies move to Texas (to take advantage of cheap labor and lack of regulation and cheap land), but our startups are not as bold as in California or Massachusetts  for example. If you need some PHDs in Math or Comp Sci, Texas is not the best place to go. (Well, except here and here) On the other hand, if you need minimally educated Americans to provide phone support, Texas can’t be beat!
    12. Creative types in Texas (and especially Houston)  tend to be snapped up by  the fossil fuel sector or the military. The tragedy here is first, much of this innovation  does not transfer easily to other fields. Second,  this innovation does not really better humanity in a way that a product manufacturer or enterpreneur might. As the years go by, the stigma of working in fossil fuels will only  increase.
    13. I have mentioned it already, but Texas consumes more fossil fuels than any other state in the US. If Texas were a nation, it would be the 7th largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Electric plants in Texas (population 25 million) emit as much CO2  as electric plants in the COMBINED states of   New York, California, Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon (population: 86 million). Texas has made the decision to couple its state economy  to the carbon  consumption and generation. But  other states have decoupled their economies from carbon and still have strong growing economies. From a standpoint of risk, sticking with fossil fuels for living and for growing an economy  doesn’t seem wise in the long term.

    In Houston (where I live), a large percent of the economy is dependent on the fossil fuel industry — either directly (with drilling, pipelines etc) or indirectly (IT support, financial services related to energy futures). Many of these services relate specifically to oil and gas and don’t transfer that easily to renewable energy or any other industry. Anyway, the profitability of fossil fuels in Texas eclipses the opportunities presented by renewables.  Houston tried to diversify after the oil bust in the 80s, but from what I can tell,  it just shifted away from domestic drilling to global exploration & logistics.

    Here is Forbes’ list of most innovative companies  and Fortune’s ‘ Best Companies to Work for in Texas and Forbes List of  Fastest Growing Companies . I realize that not every state can have a Google or Microsoft or Facebook or Amazon, but I think it’s notable that Texas doesn’t really has an industry leader (outside of fossil fuels) which it can call its own. Rackspace and Texas Instruments and Dell are distinguished companies, and Cowen’s article mentions TinyTexasHouses (which also seems great).  With these notable exceptions, Texas is where established or rising companies go to expand.

  • Houston Public Library Music RSS Feeds

    Recently the Houston Public Library switched over to a new cataloguing system. One nice feature I discovered was the ability to create custom RSS feeds out of search results. So I decided to create a table of permanent RSS feeds for the music CDs for quick reference. This is a work in progress (and actually, I probably need to refine these things and add more categories). But this is good to start with. Everything is sorted by publication date from MOST RECENT to OLDEST. Publication date doesn’t refer to when it was originally published but when the purchased CD was actually produced. So the 1966 Beatles album, Revolver, might be listed as 2009 because the remastered edition was re-released in 2009.

    By Language/CountryBy Time PeriodOther Criteria
    Chinese Language MusicPop Music 2011-2020: N American Pop/rock, Country Music, Spanish/Latino Music, Jungman Branch Music CDs
    Russian/E. European Music Excludes most classical)2001-2010: Country Music, American Pop/Rock, Soundtracks/TV/Musicals
    Arabic Language Music 90s Rock MusicJazz
    Music in Multiple Indian Languages (Includes soundtracks, classical)Electronic/Dance/House Music
    Africa: 2011-2020, African Pop/Folk (generic)Rough Guide Music Series
    New Releases

  • “Perrycare” defined

    For better or worse, the Affordable Care Act (the new health care reform law) has been dubbed “Obamacare.”

    Here’s  another neologism: Perrycare.  It is  is defined as health care inside a state which has refused Medicaid expansion despite generous financial incentives to do so. It is characterized by skyrocketing health care premiums and overall costs for individuals who fall below  138% of the federal poverty line. Named after Texas Republican governor Rick Perry. 

    Even though this graph doesn't take into account that many kids go on their parents' plan until 26, it is still an alarming amount of people

    Here are some other characteristics:

    • The population between 19-26 have the highest level of poverty. On the other hand, they are still eligible to be on their parents’ plan (that is, if their parents have a plan!). In general, people in this age range are healthy and would require care mainly for emergencies (or giving birth).
    • The population between 26 and 30 have high rates of poverty. They are no longer on their parents’ plan; on the other hand, it is assumed that their income will have risen a bit depending on how long they have been in the workforce. Females are particularly at risk here because these are generally the child-bearing years.
    • The population between 30-65. More likely to have savings, but on the other hand, more likely to have serious conditions and require several visits.

    The Kaiser Foundation has prepared a health care rate calculator. Note that it provides two estimates: the estimate under Obamacare and Perrycare. According to the site’s FAQ, “The federal poverty level varies by family size. In 2013, it is $11,490 for a single adult and $23,550 for a family of 4. The poverty level is estimated for 2014 based on Congressional Budget Office projections of inflation.”

    On a positive note, medical underwriting  will be prohibited on Jan 1 2014 under Obamacare, so very low-income individuals will be able to purchase a plan without having to go through underwriting; they just won’t be able to afford it!

    Update: Here’s a cost estimate from Kaiser about just how much money Texas is not going to spend and not going to receive:

    TEXAS (population: 26 million) 

    Without Medicaid expansion, between 2013-2022, feds would spend 228 billion and TX state would spend 159 billion on Medicaid for Texans.

    With Medicaid expansion for 2013-2022, feds would spend 305 billion and TX state would spend 168 billion on Medicaid for Texans.

    In other words, spending 9 billion dollars more on Medicaid in Texas will prompt the feds to spend 77 billion more dollars on health care for Texans over the next decade.

    New York (population 19 million)

    Without Medicaid expansion for 2013-2022, fed pays 468 billion, and NY state pays 451 billion for New Yorkers.

    With Medicaid expansion for the same time period, feds pay 553 billion, NY state pays 433 billion for New Yorkers.

    In other words, because NY already  pays a greater amount  into Medicaid,  Obamacare will cause New York to spend 18 billion dollars less on Medicaid,  while the feds will spend 85 billion dollars more on health care for  Medicaid in New York.

    A Rand analysis estimates other effects from deciding to opt out of Medicaid expansion.

    If 14 states decide not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act as intended by their governors, those state governments collectively will spend $1 billion more on uncompensated care in 2016 than they would if Medicaid is expanded. … In addition, those 14 state governments would forgo $8.4 billion annually in federal payments and an additional 3.6 million people will be left uninsured… “State policymakers should be aware that if they do not expand Medicaid, fewer people will have health insurance, and that will trigger higher state and local spending for uncompensated medical care,” Price said. “Choosing to not expand Medicaid may turn out to be the more-costly path for state and local governments.”…

    …
    Researchers also outline how failing to expand Medicaid could have more than financial consequences. Based on earlier research showing that past expansions of Medicaid has led to decreases in deaths, the study estimates that an additional 19,000 deaths could occur annually if the 14 states studied do not expand Medicaid.

    My rough  ballpark estimate is that Texas accounts for a third of the population of those states opting out of Exchanges and Medicaid  expansion. Therefore, applying the Rand’s data to Texas, we could say that Perry’s decision not to expand Medicaid will cost Texans somewhere in the range of  $300 million and result in 6000 more deaths.