Western Book Roundup

Western Revival, Powell’s Future, Psychedelic Kooser Shirts

By Jenny Shank, 12-05-07

	University of Nebraska Press's Ted Kooser shirt.

Allen Barra recently wrote an appreciation of Charles Portis’s True Grit for Salon.com.  Overlook Press reissued the 1968 novel to commemorate its 40th anniversary.  Barra writes, “In a saner world, it wouldn’t have to be reissued, it would have always remained in print,” and speculates that ”True Grit’s going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature.” Fans of western literature and films also should check out Barra’s Salon.com essay from 2006, “The New True West,” which I missed when it first came out, probably because I was in labor the day it ran.

On Monday, Scott Timberg of the L.A. Times profiled Portland’s famous Powell’s City of Books, which faces uncertainty as owner Michael Powell prepares to hand the operation over to his 29-year-old daughter.

If you’re looking for a unique Christmas gift, the University of Nebraska Press is offering the most amusing poet-themed t-shirt I’ve ever seen in honor of Ted Kooser, the lifelong Nebraskan and former U.S. poet laureate.  The “Ted Head” t-shirt features the poet’s friendly countenance over various psychedelic motifs; it seems they’ve tinted his glasses pink.  Judging from his writing, I’d vote Kooser the American poet least likely to have indulged in illegal mind-altering substances.  (As my cornhusker parents are fond of telling me, “The sixties skipped Nebraska.")

A few weeks ago, University of Colorado professor of history and author extraordinaire Patty Limerick offered her take on the recent resurgence of Western films in an interview with the New York Times Magazine.

And last week the Times ran a piece on Denver’s dear old Colfax, which is undergoing an attempted facelift.  Dan Frosch writes of the street’s literary heritage: “Colfax Avenue is often described as one of America’s wickedest streets. Jack Kerouac wrote of its tawdry watering holes in On The Road,” and notes that the street has a reputation as “a refuge for poets, addicts, hipsters and hustlers.” Sounds like Ted Kooser’s kind of a place. 

Frosch also talks to lovably irascible Denver historian Phil Goodstein, who has his doubts that any government plan can clean up Colfax:

“With a wry smile, [Goodstein] pointed out some of the Colfax’s more memorable landmarks, including an old optometrist’s office, now abandoned, where customers could buy eyeglasses to better see the pornographic magazines that were also on sale.”

I enjoyed plowing through Phil Goodstein’s two-volume history of Denver a few years back—Goodstein is sort of Denver’s answer to Howard Zinn, always looking to rouse a rabble.

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