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Don Graham. State of Minds: Texas Culture & Its Discontents. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
Having written more than my share of words, sentences, paragraphs, essays and books, what impresses me most, now, is a writer who is able to speak with a really clear and distinctive "voice." Well, sir, Don Graham, the Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas, has a voice, a Big Texas Voice-in fact, a megaphone. His essay collection State of Minds (2011) includes a "letter" he wrote impishly for Texas Monthly in 2008, addressed to "Dear Cormac" and signed "your pal, Don," that may give Cormackians something to chatter about. Graham first praises McCarthy for being reclusive ("Authors are the opposite of children: they should be read and not seen"), then excoriates him for selling out to Oprah. "I know the Oprah thing was about money," Graham says, "and on one level I certainly don't hold you, to use one of your favorite words, 'accountable.' I personally would crawl to Chicago to be on Oprah to sell books. I could hear cash-registers spitting out receipts all over America as Oprah's followers rushed out to get their kicks on Cormac's Route 666" (118-19). Well, if that don't beat the bugs a-fightin'!
Another special treat this book offers for Cormackians-that "loose confederation of enthusiasts,...