fineprint literary management laura wood tulsa

#Fineprint literary management laura wood tulsa trial

I am sorry to see writings of the Southwest substituted for noble and beautiful and wise literature to which all people everywhere are inheritors. One of the chief impediments to amplitude and intellectual freedom is provincial inbreeding. There are no substitutes for nobility, beauty, and wisdom. For any dweller of the Southwest who would have the land soak into him, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Expostulation and Reply,” and a few other poems are more conducive to a “wise passiveness” than any native writing. I think this dweller will fit his land better by understanding Thomas Jefferson’s oath (“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”) than by reading all the books that have been written on ranch lands and people.

#Fineprint literary management laura wood tulsa trial

I think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read The Trial and Death of Socrates than all the books extant on killings by Billy the Kid. Nobody should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. Yet the time is not likely to come when a human being will not be better adapted to his environments by knowing their nature on the other hand, to study a provincial setting from a provincial point of view is restricting. I have heard so much silly bragging by Texans that I now think it would be a blessing to themselves–and a relief to others–if the braggers did not know they lived in Texas. I have an inclination to rewrite the “Declaration,” but maybe I was just as wise on some matters ten years ago as I am now so I let it stand. If during a decade a man does not change his mind on some things and develop new points of view, it is a pretty good sign that his mind is petrified and need no longer be accounted among the living.

Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier backgrounds. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory “Declaration” to this now enlarged and altered book. Almost without exception, the titles that form the core of Southwestern Classics On-Line will be included in Dobie’s Guide.īeginning of Original Text (1952 Edition) Many of the titles reviewed by Dobie continue to be referenced in modern bibliographies, and will forever remain as primary sources which cover the period in which the Southwest was won. Nevertheless, Dobie’s Guide remains an important work, written in a witty style, and conveniently organized into almost three dozen categories that cover virtually every aspect of Southwestern culture. Rather, it is a commentary and listing of a miscellany of writings on the Southwest that Dobie considered “good reading.” The Guide’s purpose, according to Dobie, was primarily: to help people of the Southwest learn more of the land to which they belong, to make their past more alive, to bring them to a realization of the values of their own cultural inheritance, and to stimulate them to observe.īy nature, any such work becomes dated, as many new titles are added which often provide deeper insight into new aspects of Southwestern history and culture. The Guide, as Dobie was the first to point out, is “fragmentary, incomplete, and in no sense a bibliography” of Southwestern culture. The text for the online edition which follows is derived from the 1952 version of Dobie’s work. It was further refined and significantly expanded for republication in 1952. It served as the basis for a class which he then taught at the University of Texas in Austin. The Guide evolved from notes Dobie had collected and revised over the previous dozen or so years. Frank Dobie (1888-1964) was already widely known as a Texas author and folklorist when he first published his Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest in 1943.