The Edontic Gourmet
Or, what to eat when you ain't got no teeth.Actually, I used to have a corkboard above my desk in Berlin, on which were tacked a bunch of weird items, including the business card for a business called...
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What Happens Next
One of the things I rarely do on this blog is to talk about my work life. Really: no sense in depressing you people who drop by and read this any more than is absolutely necessary. And that's really...
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Dog Days
It's that time again. And, inevitably, people are complaining. Look, I want to say, you knew it was Texas when you moved here. And, as summers here have gone in the recent past, it really hasn't been...
View ArticleModest Disappointments
One of the books I discovered when I started to unpack my stuff from storage was T. R. Fehrenbach's classic history of Texas, Lone Star. I was happy to find it: after all these years, perhaps it was...
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Minor Annoyance
I was mooching around the Internet the other day, bored and between work duties and kind of desultorily researching my upcoming vacation without enough information or money to actually do anything...
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A Week (Almost) in India, New Jersey
Want to know how to stay in New York for four nights for less than the price of one night in a hotel? The answer is, stay in New Jersey. Specifically, stay in a crazy Indian-run hotel called the Haiban...
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Eating Québec (And Elsewhere)
The vacation I ended last week was intended to clear my mind in preparation for the hard work of writing my book, which I have just a year to do. I couldn't think of any better way to do it than to fly...
View ArticleTruckin' Around Austin
My friend Special K earns extra cash on weekends by working out at the Midway Food Park, which is where I met Steve Dean for our dance hall tour earlier this year. Her gig is schlepping the PA...
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On Returning
I'm usually pretty good about this: marking anniversaries of milestones in my life. August 12: I moved to Germany. Late October: I moved to France. October 23: I moved back to Texas. So why didn't I...
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SXSW 2015: In Which I Become a Cineaste
Many apologies for the silence here. At first I was daunted by the torrent of hate mail my last post occasioned from people I probably don't know -- many of them signed in under phony names or as the...
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Texas Dance Halls, Part Two
The last bitter, rainy, windy day passed. The sun came out more frequently. This would probably be a problem later on, but for the moment it looked good. What better way to celebrate than with the...
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California Eatin'
I took off a long weekend from book-writing last Thursday to fly to San Francisco to attend a party celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Well, the online community I've been a member of since early...
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Backyard Report
Okay, now I've done it. I've taken another step towards, um, suburbanity. A guy named Joe just deposited this on a concrete slab obviously designed to hold such a thing, just off of my deck in the back...
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Our Digital Overlords Speak
For some time, I've been promising a second half of the post I did about my ambivalence about returning to the U.S., and this isn't it. But the other day, I read a statement that seems bland enough on...
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And Now What Happens Next...
I hit this blog so infrequently these days that I'm a bit ashamed. I do love to write, and here's my personal outlet, but as most of you know, I'm writing a book, and after a few concentrated hours...
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Land Of Disenchantment: A Few Days Off
And so all the factors fell together and on Tuesday, September 8, the Grey Vibe and I left Austin for a few days' adventure in Santa Fe. And boy, did we get it.Part I: Land of Broken DreamsIt kind of...
View ArticleAnother Milestone
Friday, I fired up my file-transfer program and sent a manuscript of something like 212,594 words to my agent, who'd asked to look at it before I sent it to the publisher, which I figured was a good...
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Stomped: A Long Weekend In New Orleans
Saturday morning, I left my hotel in New Orleans and wound up walking nine miles, which, with the interruptions, took me about six hours. I did this because I'd heard that a guy I used to know, an...
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A Visit With Dracula: 1997
For about eight years, I had an enviable freelance position as a roving cultural correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Europe, with a territory encompassing Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland,...
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The Oldest City
And so it came to pass -- anyone's guess how -- that I was invited to a literary festival in Florida. No, really, a guy who hasn't had a book out since 1986 rubbing shoulders with professors and...
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