During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known--it was used pri...marily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is "the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy's pony."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptions... empirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires, Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness... With a note or two to indicate it isn't lost, On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What precisely is it About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes people to note it painstakingly in their diaries...r />For them to read who shall come after?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To "Why am I here?" To uselessness. It's the streami...ng reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading ... may be given without first getting the author's permi...ssion. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In... the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »