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Ellemeno:
Larry's bookstore in Archer, Texas

Ellemeno:
Films, books keep Larry McMurtry going
BY CANDACE CARLISLE
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Larry McMurtry’s Hermes 3000 typewriter is lonely.  It sits on the wooden table next to a ream of blank paper and a chair with a bed pillow placed on the seat, but something is missing.

Last July, there were two stacks of paper, one blank and one branded with keystrokes.  Those keystrokes later became part of his book released in July titled Books: A Memoir, in which McMurtry shared his life as a bookman.

The author recently invited a group of writers from the University of North Texas for a summer writer’s boot camp to tour the 28,000 books in his Archer City home.  Each book is marked with the family cattle brand, a stirrup, which, McMurtry says, has probably been used by now on more books than cattle.

Here’s some of what he had to say on some favorite subjects:

On the future of reading: "Young kids still love to read, but when they hit 10 or 11 years old, they get hit by a tsunami of iPods and laptops and iPhones. I think they stop at that point. You have to concentrate on getting them books when they are younger."

On his used-book empire in Archer City: "Booked Up is one of the last browse-able bookstores anywhere. I mean, there are only three or four like us left now . . . I think it is important that there be large browseable bookshelves. You don’t want to just discard something that has been around 500 years. Books travel throughout the world. "

On screenwriting: "I’ve been very lucky. Part of my luck was that my first novel, Horseman, Pass By, was made into a successful movie, a movie called HUD — it was very successful. Because of that . . . almost everything that comes along Western, I get offered. By and large, I finance my book business by writing screenplays."

On Brokeback Mountain: "[Writing partner Dianna Ossana and I] both recognized Brokeback Mountain as a great story and asked that day if we could option it. There was a flood of people wanting to read it, but we got it first. My partner’s very tenacious and through thick and thin, she hung onto it. We waited until Heath Ledger got big enough we could cast him. It was a lot of luck and a lot of patience. You have to hang in there for a long time sometimes.

"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ve been waiting five or six years for Tom Hanks to make my little novel Boone’s Lick that has been published and ready to go. It has been pushed back and pushed back. So we’ll see. Five or six years is a long time. It doesn’t always work."

On his next project: "My struggle is with fiction. It is a habit I need to break, and it is not working for me anymore. I don’t want to write inferior fiction.

"Most aging novelists unconsciously repeat themselves; they unconsciously do what they have done before, only with less force and less intelligence usually. It is not an infinite gift, it is a finite gift. Almost none of them wrote a good book past 60 or 65. You tap into it, you empty it and you stop.

"Somehow the brain works better when you aren’t fictionalizing. I’ve written a lot of novels and have run out. So whatever I write next will be nonfiction. And it could be a biography, I would like to write a biography on Mackenzie, the adversary of the Comanches or essays, and I don’t think I’ll write any more memoirs.

"I don’t want to stop writing. I have other parts of my life, I have screenwriting and I have bookshops."

http://www.star-telegram.com/books/story/799670.html

CellarDweller:
A Page of the Past

Traces of real-life Texans ride through McMurtry?s ?Lonesome Dove?

BY W.F. STRONG AUGUST 2023



Millions of copies of Larry McMurtry?s Lonesome Dove have sold since the novel was published in 1985. The miniseries that followed in 1989 was likewise immensely popular. McMurtry himself called it the Gone With the Wind of the West, but he never loved the book as much as his fans. ?You know most writers come to dislike their most popular books,? he once told journalist John Spong. ?Henry James hated Daisy Miller, which is what he is known by. He?s probably written 35 other books. I feel a little that way about Lonesome Dove.?

McMurtry said he never saw the miniseries. Maybe if he had, he would have better understood how endearingly Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and Diane Lane brought their characters to life. I can?t help but wonder if those characters were modeled after real-life Texans.

But McMurtry said that that wasn?t his aim. Though Woodrow Call has some attributes of Charles Goodnight, and Gus McCrae has some attributes of Oliver Loving, the novel?s main characters were not modeled after actual historical figures. McMurtry said the book is not meant to be a faithful history of the era but rather one that has echoes of those times.

https://texascooppower.com/a-page-of-the-past/

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