I'm heading to West Texas (Panhandle) and Eastern New Mexico next month. I need to spend some time on the llano estacado, for the novel I'm writing. Need to get a sense of the air, the ground, the light. The novel is set mostly in Weimar-era Germany, where and when my father, HHB, grew up. He was an Anglo-Irish guy transplanted (deported, actually) to Frankfurt in 1919, age 9, who came of age in that complicated crazy period of German history 1919-33, and taught himself the language of Goethe by reading and re-reading Karl May's Winnetou novels, which are set on the llano estacado. Hence HHB's lifelong fascination with the Wild West, passed on to me. Sounds like a novel, right? So any insider information on the that huge, dry country much appreciated. Right now I'm reading Pekka Hamalainen's wonderful Comanche Empire and learning how the llano estaduco--and 1000's of sq. miles of shortgrass plains east of the Rio Grande Valley and Spanish New Mexico--was dominated from the mid-18th to mid-19th century by the Comanche, a powerful empire of their own once they got horses and iron and good guns.
One of best books about that part of the West (after the mid-19th) is Hampton Sides' Blood & Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson.
Trucks, cars, highways, landscape, good writing. "You cannot travel on the path, before you have become the Path itself."
PHB
- autoliterate
- Brooklin, Maine, United States
- We own a 1975 GMC Sierra Grande 15 in Maine and a 1986 Chevrolet Custom Deluxe 10 in West Texas. Also a pair of 1997 Volvo 850 wagons. Average age in the fleet is 28 years--we're recycling. I've published 3 novels: THE LAW OF DREAMS (2006), THE O'BRIENS (2012), and CARRY ME (2016). Also 2 short story collections: NIGHT DRIVING(1987) and TRAVELLING LIGHT (2013). More of my literary life is at www.peterbehrens.org I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for 2012-13. I'm an adjunct professor at Colorado College and in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. In 2015-16 I was a Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Autoliterate office is in Car Talk Plaza in Harvard Square, 2 floors above Dewey Cheatem & Howe. SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUTOLITERATE DAILY EMAIL by hitting the button to the right.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
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Peter, I'm looking forward to reading this, and I love that 1960 Impala, probably my favorite Chevrolet of all those years.
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