Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

Author - Larry McMurtry ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Simon & Schuster was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. From the beginning to the end, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, kept my interest. Unlike his fiction, where it is difficult to determine how McMurtry feels about certain events or people, he is much more transparent in this marvelous book. This compilation of essays on a wide variety of subjects demonstrates his smooth prose, his gift for story-telling, and his obvious love for his family and the region surrounding Archer City. But lest one expects a regional personal narrative, this book has implications far wider than at first appearance. He offers his views on a variety of subjects and holds back very little on the effects of technology, the future of ranching, book-selling, reading, and even a particular parade!

While he wants to be known for his fiction, it is his non-fiction that tends to come across with the most sincerity and honesty. McMurtry´s perceptions of people and ability to find pleasure and humor in anecdotal situations is to be admired and embraced. Since a study of history helps us understand the mistakes of the past and progress to the future, in many ways, I felt this book to be a history book with a strong, optimistic spirit for the future.

Certainly one of my favorites, I recommend this highly to anyone. I cannot give it five stars since I am highly selective on the highest rating. You will gain from reading this fine book and will find yourself anxious to learn more about book trading as well as the reminder to love and appreciate your friends and family.¤

2) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. Written when McMurtry was 62, WALTER BENJAMIN AT THE DAIRY QUEEN is probably best classified as a memoir, although it is not presented as such. Rather, the construct (perhaps "artifice" is the more apt word) is McMurtry sitting in the Dairy Queen in hometown Archer City, Texas reading an essay on storytelling by Walter Benjamin, which then prompts McMurtry to reflect on and then pass along some of the stories of his life. This Dairy Queen/Walter Benjamin construct comes across as a tad contrived, maybe a little too self-consciously "artsy," but on the whole the stories McMurtry tells are well worth listening to.

The two principle subjects of the book (tracking, one assumes, the two principle preoccupations of McMurtry´s life) are (i) the American West -- including that pocket of the West local to Archer County, Texas where McMurtry grew up and his grandparents were pioneering settlers -- and (ii) books, reading, and writing. Throughout the book, seamlessly interwoven with reflections about larger themes such as the West, the doomed and mythical cowboy, and literature are themes or events personal to McMurtry, such as growing up on a hard-scrabble North Texas ranch, his father, going in his teens to the big city and later Rice University, returns to Archer City relating to "The Last Picture Show", and his quadruple-bypass surgery and its extended psychic aftermath.

I see that previous reviews have characterized McMurtry as "crusty" or "cranky," which in my view does him and the book a disservice. Without any obvious effort to ingratiate himself with the reader, McMurtry comes off as personable and likeable. It is not much of a stretch to envision him actually relating these stories and reflections after the meal around a dining room table or maybe even a campfire (albeit not any Dairy Queen of my experience). Yes, in such circumstances McMurtry probably would tend to monopolize the discussion, but he knows more than most of us and, as his fiction suggests, he is a better storyteller than most.

I vascillate between giving the book 4 or 5 stars. If possible, I would settle on 4.5. Because that´s not possible, I am rounding up to 5.¤

3) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. Larry McMurtry is, as Proust and Virginia Woolf are to him, my Nile of literature. The quality of his prolific output has been inconsistent, but I find myself constantly returning to his work. Like all writers, McMurtry has his faults. But he is the best I have encountered in warding off, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, that dark inertia to which we are all susceptible.

One of McMurtry´s rare pieces of non-fiction, this is an intensely readable book - intentionally so, it seems, following the path of the oral tradition. McMurtry mourns the demise of this tradition, while at the same time seeking to find the positive in the historical developments that have killed it. McMurtry´s yarns describe his childhood, his discovery of books, and his bouts with depression, including his ruminations on literature´s place in his life, and his life´s place in this country´s physical, historical, and literary landscape.

All of the tributary themes of the book join together as the book progresses, through McMurtry´s own White and Blue Nile of Proust (who I personally like) and Woolf (with whom I have never been able to connect)and into a general inspiration to literature. McMurtry says that he early identified books as the central and stable activity in his life. This book is a testament to the joys and comforts of doing the same.

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4) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen by Walter Benjamin. The essay he was reading was about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today.

Larry McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas. He shares discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college at Rice University, knowing virtually nothing about literature, transferring to North Texas State University to finish his bachelor´s degree as a workaround for a troublesome Rice professor, and then doing his Master´s at Rice University.

He tells some about writing, his love for books that leads to his becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer. Across from the Archer City court house he has a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books, and the dying legacy of the cowboy. He shares little about his personal life except his love for reading and his quadruple bypass surgery which was very traumatic. It may be as close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry. The work is well written, wide, but not deep. We do not get to know McMurty at a level most would like to experience.

Read and reviewed by Jimmie A. Kepler.¤

5) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. This sat on my shelf for years and I finally pulled it down. I´m glad I did. He expounds on aging, the west, books, his own writing, and reading. His writing is conversational and comfortable. Very enjoyable!¤

6) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City´s Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life´s work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

¤

7) Paperback Book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Simon & Schuster. Do you really want to listen to a cranky old man ramble on about his childhood, his heart surgery, his hobbies, his son, and the way things, in general, aren´t what they used to be? It turns out you do. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry comes the old pardner, and the result is a powerful elegy for the lost spaces in American life. He takes as his starting point an afternoon he spent at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas, reading the pensées of early 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin. At the time Benjamin was writing, McMurtry´s grandparents were settling dusty reaches of west Texas, and McMurtry crosscuts neatly between Benjamin´s spent, smoky Europe and his own grandparents´ America: "While my grandparents were dealing with almost absolute emptiness, both social and cultural, Europe was approaching an absolute (and perhaps intolerable) density." McMurtry demonstrates a confidence almost bordering on naiveté in the way he appropriates the great thinking of Europe and applies it to his own history. He apologizes neither to the highfalutin Europeans nor to the down-home Americans, but makes them lie down together any way he sees fit. This brio makes Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen a thrilling read.

McMurtry´s book-length essay loops outward from Archer City to encompass a polemic against computers, a foray into the world of book collecting, a family biography, an account of his soul-loss after heart surgery, and finally an elegy for the cowboy. This last lament casts a shadow back over what we´ve read. Not just over this book, but over McMurtry´s whole body of work. A man who´s lived his whole life in print gives us a glimpse of what has fed him, and, strangely, it´s loss. "Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds." The master of storytelling is finally revealed as a master of melancholy. --Claire Dederer¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, 06848701939780684870199, 950-570-930-640-450-420-431-971-VUB-8

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