2010 Texas Book Festival

I got to go to the Texas Book Festival again this year, although only for Sunday because Saturday was taken up with Steve’s memorial service.

L was (and still is) suffering from ragweed-induced bronchitis and couldn’t walk fast nor long, so I cut back expectations to going to only two sessions.  The first, “Not All That Noir: Wickedly Funny Crime Fiction,” was a dud by my lights.  I didn’t know any of the authors (Lou Berney, Mark Haskell Smith, and Jonathan Woods, with Harry Hunsicker moderating), and what they did have to say didn’t engage me.  I left a few minutes early, and met up with L and M, who had gone down to check out some of the vendor/press tents, and we went to grab early (VERY early) seats for the other session I intended to see, a presentation with the photographer of Home Field:  Texas High School Football Stadiums from Alice to Zephyr.  This book grew out of a photo essay published in 2004 in Texas Monthly, and is a group of photographs of seventy-some high-school football stadia in Texas, from the largest to smallest.  The pictures were all shot during the winter months—December through February, after the season was over and before spring could change the look of the field.  The photographer set up his camera on the fifty-yard line facing the home stands for each photo, and tried to shoot each one at dawn to give the same lighting values.

The audience, to listen to them, found the pictures everything from entertaining to arresting (collective gasps greeted one or two).  Fortunately, the photographer and his co-author, who did all the legwork to gather quotes and write the textblocks, were both articulate and proud of what they’d done, with reason.  One especially funny anecdote they told had to do with getting Buzz Bissinger to write the introduction.  The editor at University of Texas Press, which published the book, absolutely slaved for two days over every word of an email containing the request, with a description of the book and a sampling of the photographs attached.  He finally sent it off . . . only to get a laconic “Yeah, sure, why not?” in reply.

After the session, we walked down to the signing tent and bought a copy of the book, which I think is as important in its way as Geoff Winningham’s classic Rites of Fall, and hauled it over to the signing tent to get Wilson’s signature on it.  I told him I thought his work would come to be seen as a bookend companion to Winningham’s work, which he took as the compliment I meant it to be.

By this time L was flagging, so we slowly worked back up through the vendor tents so I could see them (I bought a history of pecans from Texas Tech Press), and then came home.  I was sorry to have to miss Saturday, but getting to see the session for the football field book was a good consolation.