Author Archives: Flash and Filigree

The U.S. Ambassador To Love

September 14, 2026 by Flash and Filigree

Dolly Parton was a role model for all of us: the U.S. Ambassador to Love, the real kind that means loving your neighbor no matter the color of their skin, the language they speak, who they love, or which box they check on a ballot. She was generous in ways that seemed almost impossible for one human to be, pouring out her fortune and her heart in equal measure, as if she had discovered some secret well of kindness that […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: country-music, dolly-parton, life, Music, Writing

THOUGHTS FOR TODAY AND EVERY DAY

July 23, 2026 by Flash and Filigree

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced ~ the two ideas work together. Facing history honestly doesn’t guarantee you can fix everything. But looking away guarantees nothing changes at all. We are our history, not […]

Categories: Uncategorized

Larry McMurtry: May the Books Flourish!

September 5, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

Larry wrote a piece for The Daily Beast today and we have it here for you… Enjoy! “For writer Larry McMurtry, auctioning off part of his vast book collection was bittersweet, but they are off on a new adventure in the hands of new readers. He writes to urge readers to support a film on Kickstarter documenting this remarkable sale.” At present, the fledgling artistic project nearest to my heart is a worthy one called “BOOKS, A Documentary,” a film about my […]

Categories: Ramblings • Tags: Booked Up, books, Books Movie, Documentary film, Kickstarter, Larry McMurtry, Mathew Provost, Sara Ossana, Studio Seven7 Films, The Last Book Sale

5 Books every American should read…

July 6, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

Originally posted on Books: A Documentary:
In celebration of Independence Day, we asked Larry if he would give us a list of the 5 books he thinks every American should read, here is what he said: One of the fun things to do in a well-stocked bookshop such as the one shown in this lovely, haunting documentary is to create Best Book Lists. I was working on a history of these harmless exercises for Barbara Epstein, a great woman of…

Categories: Love & Literature, Uncategorized • Tags: 4th of July, America, american prose, Archer City Texas, Awakenings, Barbara Epstein, Book, Booked Up, books, Books Movie, bookshop, booksmovie.org, Documentary film, Ernest Hemingway, Fourth of July, Holidays, Huckleberry Finn, Independence Day, Kickstarter, Larry McMurtry, Mark Twain, Mathew Provost, Meriwether Lewis, meriwether lewis and william clark, must read, New York Review of Books, Oliver Sacks, read, reading, Sara Ossana, Shopping, Studio Seven7 Films, Summer reading, Sun Also Rises, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, The Last Book Sale, The Sun Also Rises, Thomas Pynchon, United States, V, William Clark

THE RHETORIC OF EXERCISE – Part Two

June 29, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

THE RHETORIC OF EXERCISE Part Two The most frequently heard phrase in the various gyms I’ve attempted to participate in is “stand up nice and tall”, a phrase I have directed at me twenty times a visit, at least. The questing mind–and I still have one–is stumped by this much cherished phrase, cherished by the exercise techs, but not by me. I am not very tall (six foot on a good day), and my niceness is a matter of opinion. […]

Categories: Call It a Spade, Ramblings • Tags: "stand up nice and tall", bicycle, cardiac rehabilitation, gym, Heart attack, Larry McMurtry, personal trainer, West Texas, working-class

THE RHETORIC OF EXERCISE – Part One

June 28, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

THE RHETORIC OF EXERCISE Part One I’m 77 years of age, and lately my fickle heart has shown signs of wanting to lay down its burden: i.e., me. Three of its efforts to cut me adrift were judged to be “cardiac events,” and who am I to say they were or were not. So hie to the gym, my doctors pleaded, to undertake some–they mean a lot–of cardiac rehabilitation. So I joined a gym. Let me just mention that I […]

Categories: Call It a Spade, Ramblings • Tags: bicycle, cardiac rehabilitation, gym, Heart attack, Larry McMurtry, personal trainer, West Texas, working-class

RAMBLINGS ON REPUTATION

June 14, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

RAMBLINGS ON REPUTATION In this day and age, it seems writers have to fight merely to have their writings become an actual book. We have a few famous friends whose latest works have yet to see print, either on the printed page or in e-book form. We suppose that fame is a notoriously fickle mistress, literary fame no less than any other kind. And we are set to think about this truism by the appearance of the Library of America’s […]

Categories: Love & Literature, Ramblings • Tags: David Stacton, Diana Ossana, Eastern New Mexico University, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, Larry McMurtry, Library of America, Lonesome Dove, Mark Twain, Max Crawford, Norman Mailer now, Rice University, Saul Bellow, Sherwood Anderson, Terms of Endearment, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner

OFF AGAIN/ON AGAIN HOLLYWOOD

June 5, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

OFF AGAIN/ON AGAIN HOLLYWOOD Yesterday, while rummaging through Diana’s (locked) book case, Larry pulled out a shabby green folio which turned out to be his second screenplay: an adaptation of “The Floating Opera,” John Barth’s brilliant first novel, not thought of by Larry in many a year. In 1991, the day before Larry’s open-heart-quadruple-bypass surgery, he spoke to John Barth’s fiction class at Johns Hopkins University. John mentioned nothing about Larry’s adaptation, and he’s not heard from John Barth from […]

Categories: Hollywood • Tags: Bob Fosse, Brokeback Mountain, Cybill Shepherd, Diana Ossana, Dorothy Stratten, James L. Brooks, John Barth, Larry McMurtry, Matt Groening, Paul Snider, Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt, The Floating Opera, toothpick

BIG TEX

May 28, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

BIG TEX Dallas, Texas would never want to be the Capital of Kitsch, yet where else on the planet can you get deep-fried bubble gum? This and other delicacies are to be had at the glorious (to the locals) State Fair of Texas, a beloved institution that sucks in 2,500,000 visitors a year, a crowd that has been described, perhaps cruelly, as containing “fifty kinds of Bubba.” Probably the fair’s most visited attractions was Big Tex: a fifty-two foot […]

Categories: Curve Balls • Tags: Big Tex, Bill Bragg, Dallas, Larry McMurtry, Texas, Texas State Fair, True Westerner Award

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