The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance has finally packed away its sweaters as it brings you this week's roundup of the best blog posts from the left of the Lone Star State.

Off the Kuff evaluates the Castro-Patrick debate.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos is horrified by the Texas Republican campaign strategies that vilify women and immigrants, in Boats N' Hoes, Snake Oil Dealers and Diseases from Mexico.

Horwitz at Texpatriate discusses the implication of Uber, the infamous ridesharing app, openly breaking the law in Houston.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson reminds us that Democrats in Texas can't keep fighting one election at a time and go home in-between. This week's Poll Was A Bummer, Now Get To Work!

On the horns of a pair of dilemmas -- one being a progressive in Texas, the other associated with the president and the attorney general's playing of the race card -- PDiddie at Brains and Eggs finds himself a little uncomfortable.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants to know why gun pushers are so pushy. Only the gun manufacturers win. And that's the point: Ted Cruz is pushing the NRA propaganda.

Neil at All People Have Value made some posts from London this past week. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

BOR pens an ode, in word and Twitpic, to the massive and successful Wendy Davis/BGTX door-knocking campaign last weekend.

Lone Star Q celebrates the four Texans on the Out Magazine Power 50 list.

The Texas Green Report celebrates the latest win in court by the EPA over industrial polluters and the attorneys general that abet them.

The Texican reminds us that live animals do not make good gifts.

RH Reality Check reports that the state lawsuit against the prohibition of funds for the Women's Health Program going to Planned Parenthood was allowed to proceed by the Third Court of Appeals.

Bob Dunn updates his site's legal disclaimer.

Sunday Funnies

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1927 - 2014

Some recollections of a literary titan.

When he arrived in Mexico City (in 1961), García Márquez had few friends and no prospects of work. He aimed for the movie industry, but when his family ran out of food, he took a job editing a women’s magazine and a crime magazine on the condition that his name would never appear in either. Later he landed jobs as a scriptwriter and as an advertising copywriter.

In his mid-30s, his ability to write fiction appeared to have dried up. His previous novel had been written in Paris, and he couldn’t seem to finish another. According to the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who first met García Márquez around this time, he was “a tortured soul, an inhabitant of the most exquisite hell: that of literary sterility.”

One day in 1965, as García Márquez drove from Mexico City to Acapulco for a holiday weekend, everything changed. According to legend, he was navigating a twisting highway when the first sentence of “(One Hundred Years of) Solitude” suddenly formed in his mind:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” 

 The practitioner of magical realism was at his best in my favorite, Love in the Time of Cholera.

The lives García Márquez next made "believable" were those of his parents, whose extended courtship was rendered into Love in the Time of Cholera, first published in 1985. The novel tells how a secret relationship between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by Fermina's marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be rekindled more than 60 years later.

After the doctor died... not from cholera, but from the rescue of a parrot in a mango tree.  A bit more about "Solitude", his masterwork, to whet the appetite of those who may be unfamiliar:

It’s often said that the works of Colombian novelist and short-story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez are quintessential examples of “magic realism”: fiction that integrates elements of fantasy into otherwise realistic settings. In his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which ambles through a century in the lives of one family in the enchanted Latin American hamlet of Macondo, magic carpets fly, ghosts haunt villagers, and trickles of blood from a killing climb stairs and turn corners to find the victim’s mother in her kitchen.

And how prose like that came about.

He believes that (fellow author William) Faulkner differs from him on this matter in that Faulkner's outlandishness is disguised as reality.

"Faulkner was surprised at certain things that happened in life," García said, 'but he writes of them not as surprises but as things that happen every day."

García feels less surprised. "In Mexico," he says, "surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."

Now if you will excuse me, I have some reading to do.