I have a lot of catch-up work to do, I suppose.

I can’t wait to dive into this book again and document it here.

Here is the first paragraph to get it started.

Much more to follow, I hope.

“In the summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road—Olney’s, eighteen miles south—but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth–century lives.”

–Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen (Amazon)