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Posted
2 hours ago, dcbc said:

 

Strange Peaches (Shrake)

Horseman Pass By (McMurtry)

All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)

 

I’d say dive into all three of those dudes’ catalogs and don’t look back. McCarthy is singular - won’t even comment on the impact he had on me (moreso in later life than as a student).  McMurtry, to me, is the reading equivalent of a comfortable, beloved pair of slippers. I’ve read most of his books several times and a few of them maybe a dozen (Some Can Whistle, Cadillac Jack, Anything for Billy, All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers).  His non-fiction, particularly his Hollywood stuff, is also great. Also, throw in Goodbye to a River by Graves. 

I loved professor Adams, as well. I miss the program a lot and part of me wishes I’d continued my studies into grad school (BA English ‘98). 
 

And, yes, I did some extensive study on Chaucer and early/middle European Lit. I fell in love with The Canterbury Tales in high school and never shook it. 

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Posted
22 minutes ago, ohchaucer said:

McMurtry, to me, is the reading equivalent of a comfortable, beloved pair of slippers.

I agree with everything you wrote.  But I'd probably say that HPB is a less comfortable pair of slippers than a lot of his later works.  Mike Adams gave a 45 minute presentation at a UT Appellate Seminar in the early 2000s entitled "Words Like Sunbeams."  In his spare time, he proofread/edited appellate briefs for some of the bigger, Austin law firms who cared enough to pay for his services. 

 

My notes from that CLE a la Max Fischer:

 

"Best Chapel speaker ever."

 

 

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Posted
4 hours ago, strangulation! said:

I'm sure there were multiple 316Ks. Kaulbach was awesome, albeit incredibly politically incorrect, even at that time.

Wasn’t 316K the one you could place out  with an on campus achievement test? That test was about an 8th grade level 

 

 

Posted
4 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Wasn’t 316K the one you could place out  with an on campus achievement test? That test was about an 8th grade level 

 

 

No.  There are a couple of 316s, but none of them is "Freshman English 1," or whatever that was.

Posted

I must be getting senile. I don’t remember ever taking a lower division English course, and we didn’t have AP English at my high school.
 

English BA ‘88

 

Posted

Koolbauch(?) was indeed a fuckin trip. I had him the semester after I took a class where Clifford Antone was our semester long guest professor for the history of the blues… antone’s suv would roll into that handicap spot going up the hill in the back of Garrison Hall and stumble down the auditorium steps drunk as hell most days. Surely that was some kinda community service payoff by him. 

pretty damn cool class tho, had pine top Perkins and earl pool ball come play

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Posted (edited)
3 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

I must be getting senile. I don’t remember ever taking a lower division English course, and we didn’t have AP English at my high school.
 

English BA ‘88

 

I know this needs its own thread by now, and I apologize for mentioning my major two pages ago and starting this threadjack.

 

I didn't take AP English and placed out of Freshman English 1 by taking a CLEP test at orientation.  I took Freshman English 2 the second semester of my Freshman year.  I eventually majored in English.  I have no ideas what the numbers mean apart from the fact that the "3" means its 3 hours.

 

My son, a Freshman, placed out of it by taking a dual credit English course in high school.  Lots of ways to go about it.

Edited by dcbc
Posted
16 minutes ago, dcbc said:

No.  There are a couple of 316s, but none of them is "Freshman English 1," or whatever that was.

During my time, E306 was the one anyone literate placed out of by SAT achievement test.  E316 was mandatory to graduate and came in three flavors, American, British, or World Lit.  I took World from Kaulbach and enjoyed it.  Still have my Norton's from then.

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Posted

Sorry to all of us celebrating Trump's suckage with all the English major nostalgia.

 

@immamac, when you get a chance, could you migrate all the English Major BS from the last 2 pages to the thread below.  Oh, and cook and do all the other stuff for the tailgate too.  I paid $20, and I'm comin' in hot!

 

 

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Posted (edited)
11 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:


I started at a math and science school. I promptly realized those around me were all gifted in such a way that all the studying in the world would never close the gap between my struggles and their natural mathematical abilities. I also realized there was like one woman in the room and I was clearly too dumb for her, never mind what my standards at the time may have been.

I was good at art and languages, so naturally one day I decided to go back to school and study to be a Materials Engineer. It was a character builder seeing as I had to teach myself Trig before I could start taking the Calculus courses. Those weren't bad if all I did was study, which I did while sipping bourbon in order to break and rebuild my brain. Calc I was OK because it was taught in the Religious Cult/Drill Sergeant way that I respond well too, but by Calc 3 I was in a ditch.

Physics was easy when it was throwing baseballs on the moon, but when we moved on to electrical fields I started drooling. I still had a crow-like ability to make things work in Physics lab, but no clue as to why.

Chemistry was fine at first because I clued in that I didn't have to outrun the bear, I just needed to outrun the other campers, and a 30 scaled up to a B. But then I had a lab where we were playing with acid, and my station was next to the sink. The sink where every little bastard in the lab would blast the water full-strength into their test tubes to clean them, spraying me, about 20 times per lab, with diluted acid.

Then one day in Calc 3 I was trying to keep up, all the while this one dude was blurting the answers before the professor could finish the questions. I realized then that I had been the same as him, in language classes. That's when I started fading out of the photo of the Engineering family.

Edited by RDCanecutter
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Posted
4 hours ago, dcbc said:

 

Strange Peaches (Shrake)

Horseman Pass By (McMurtry)

All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)

 

Great choices… I would throw in the Gay Place and Goodbye to a River for Texas books.

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Posted (edited)
30 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

Great choices… I would throw in the Gay Place and Goodbye to a River for Texas books.

Haven't heard of Goodbye to a River.  Just read a summary, and I need to pick that up.

Edited by dcbc
Posted
4 hours ago, dcbc said:

 

Strange Peaches (Shrake)

Horseman Pass By (McMurtry)

All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)

 

Spend a couple of years learning Spanish, you can do it if you ditch your English-speaking family and immerse yourself in Mexico City with your new friend(s). Then get a copy of El Periquillo Sarniento by Lizardi, it's the first Mexican novel. Don't get the fucking edited version that every damn Spanish Lit professor doles out to you saying the rest just goes on too long-- NO. Be a DAREDEVIL! Get the whole giant multivolume book and enjoy your picaresque crawl around New Spain. The main character aka the Scruffy Parrot has to be a distant Spanish ancestor of Beavis and Butthead.

The unedited work can be had for about 100 bucks. Yeah sure you can't spare a hundred, and you say you're STEM, right...

Posted
10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

New here?

Since I created a new thread, I'm absolved from further thread-jacking here on the subject.

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Posted
6 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Did anyone have a professor named Hopper at UT?  


anyway, he was my cousin, I never got to know him because he died in ‘98 but seemed like an awesome dude.  RIP.

CSB 

 

Seen deader on campus

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Posted
28 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

What the fuck, guys?

Y'all stay on message almost as well as Trump.

 

7 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

First time?  Adult ADD is awesome.

 

Speaking of...

McDonald’s, Pelosi, Debate Moderators: Trump Speech on Border Veers Off Course
After reading from prepared remarks on immigration for 10 minutes, Donald J. Trump used the rest of a news conference to talk about everything else on his mind.

Donald Trump stands inside Trump Tower with a row of American flags behind him and a crowd of reporters in front of him.

Former President Donald J. Trump began his news conference on Thursday in the lobby of Trump Tower, standing in front of seven American flags. He laid a bound folder down on a lectern and declared that he was going to focus on the southern border, where his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, is headed on Friday.

That lasted about 10 minutes.

Mr. Trump quickly appeared to grow bored with the remarks he read from, and drifted repeatedly toward other topics. He talked about inflation, accused Ms. Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s years ago and nursed his fury over how the ABC News debate moderators handled his face-off with Ms. Harris nearly three weeks ago.

At the beginning of the news conference, Mr. Trump struggled at times to articulate his thoughts or make a point clearly. He stumbled over some words as he read from remarks he had plainly not written. He bootstrapped one thought onto another based on whether the words associated with something else, as opposed to having a clear through line.

After he accused Ms. Harris of ruining San Francisco while she was the district attorney, a recent favorite line of attack, Mr. Trump followed it up with tangents that related loosely to the city of San Francisco as opposed to the reason he was at the lectern.

“And you know, you can go to California, where she ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “She destroyed. San Francisco may have been the greatest city in the world, 16, 18 years ago, and now it’s a practically unlivable place. And I hate to say that. I have property in San Francisco. It’s not a good thing to say, but this far supersedes my ownership of property. It’s an unlivable place. It was the best city. Bob Tisch, of Loews, a friend of mine. Great guy. Wonderful man. He was in San Francisco. He was in Chicago. He had big businesses all over, the Tisch family. Bob Tisch used to tell me that he thinks San Francisco is the greatest city in the country. He passed away, quite a while ago. But, and San Francisco probably was. And now it’s not even livable.”

He then criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, knocked Ms. Harris for not saying the phrase “illegal alien,” accused Democrats of a coup, then pointed to reports that Nancy Pelosi’s husband sold Visa stock before the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company as evidence that Ms. Pelosi “should be prosecuted.” He also said Ms. Pelosi should be prosecuted for security lapses at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob overran the building, some of them hunting for Ms. Pelosi.

Then, after having briefly mentioned the attack on the Capitol, he returned to his immigration policy, and listed ways in which he said Ms. Harris had failed the country on the issue.

At another point, reviving his contention that Democrats purposefully encouraged a surge of migrants to cross the border illegally, Mr. Trump said he would enumerate the party’s reasons for doing so. After offering two explanations, he seemed to fail to find a third.

“No. 3, you know what that one is,” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t have to talk about that one.”

The group of Trump employees and supporters gathered in the lobby along one of the barricades that penned in where Mr. Trump spoke appeared to grow restless, with some looking around, as Mr. Trump talked and talked.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers want him to focus on the economy almost entirely, given its resonance in polling. But he prefers to discuss immigration. Ms. Harris’s trip gave Mr. Trump that opportunity, and some advisers were pleased he took it.

After about 45 minutes, Mr. Trump then told reporters that he would meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday morning, their first meeting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Trump was impeached by the House in 2019 on charges stemming from his urging Mr. Zelensky to initiate a corruption investigation into the Biden family ahead of the 2020 election.

Earlier this week, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Zelensky, who had appeared in Pennsylvania with Democrats and had criticized Mr. Trump’s running mate, of making “nasty aspersions” about him and for being a “man who refuses to make a deal” to end the war in Ukraine. Mr. Trump has repeatedly insisted he would bring the conflict to a swift close, even as he offered virtually no detail about how he might do so.

Then he took some questions from reporters.

The first was about Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who was charged this week with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Adams has praised him, and used the case to bolster his own effort to discredit the federal investigations Mr. Trump himself is facing. He baselessly asserted that the investigations are politically motivated efforts by the Biden administration.

Insisting that Mr. Adams had probably been indicted because the mayor had criticized the federal government’s response to the city’s migrant crisis, Mr. Trump said, “I wish him well, but I said that he will be indicted because he did that.”

He refused to acknowledge a question asked repeatedly about whether he would pardon Mr. Adams if he became president again.

Then he dodged several questions about whether Ukraine should cede its land to Russia in order to end the bloody incursion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia first began in 2022. Ms. Harris earlier in the day made a jab at Mr. Trump, arguing that people who would propose Ukraine cede some of its territory to Russia were asking the country to surrender.

“It would have been a lot easier to work out prior to the start,” said Mr. Trump, who has praised Mr. Putin over the years and described the invasion as “smart” when it first occurred.

He answered a question about whether he would rescind his endorsement of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who’s running for governor and who has been linked in a CNN report to making homophobic, racist and antisemitic statements on a pornographic website before he was a candidate. Mr. Trump responded, “I don’t know the situation.”

As he left the lobby, he stopped when someone asked if Ukraine should give up territory.

“We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said.

 

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Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, dcbc said:

Haven't heard of Goodbye to a River.  Just read a summary, and I need to pick that up.

Also read some Elmer Kelton, The Time It Never Rained is great.  I don’t remember his name, but I took a Native American Studies class one semester that was fantastic.  The professor was this old guy, the first day he came out with an atlatl and stuck a spear into the wall and proceeded to tell what a great invention it was.

My senior year, I took an economics course where Walt Rostow was a guest lecturer and he explained all the mistakes they made with policies toward developing countries. 

Edited by Judge Roybeanbag
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Posted
1 hour ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

This remembrance of Don Graham is one of the best things you'll read this year:

https://alcalde.texasexes.org/2021/11/after-life-remembering-don-graham/

 

Thanks for the link, HE.

This sentence stood out to me:

“He was infinitely proud of the myriad of races and national identities that defined not only a modern, urban Texas, but had been such a key component of Texas history all along.”

 

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Posted
1 minute ago, Steamboat1874 said:

Willie Nile is damn good.

Gets a lot of airplay on Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

Criminally underrated

Posted
20 hours ago, Dnaguy said:

Any suggestions from said reading list for us STEM guys who like to pretend we are learned?

STEM guy here, computer science. As a student, I was really into The Lost and Beat Generation writers, and Hunter S. Thompson. I always found literature and the humanities in general to be a great mental escape from the drudgery of technical work.

Posted

Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” is an excellent read.  It’s a dystopian story that takes place in LA between the years 2024-2027 where everyone has guns, there’s a massive poverty problem, a water shortage, and Christian fundamentalism is on the rise.  The fictional character that wins the presidency in 2024 wins on a platform of privatizing the space industry, abolishing the minimum wage, and rolling back environmental regulations. 
 

The book was written in 1993 and Octavia Butler died in 2006. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Shut up Lou Holtz said:

Fuck yes. I would have read way more books in high school if we had this version of the scarlet letter 

At the rate we are going, 100 years from now Danielle Steel novels will be held with the same esteem of Herman Melville.  

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Posted
7 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Wait...did you say FUCKING literature?

81MZTAl1BNL._UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

 

Thanks for posting that, I have a sequel hear Christie Sims is coming out with a sequel involving a triceratops.  Just picture Jason Segel as a triceratops trying to fuck a human woman.



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