I haven't really written anything in years. I've tried to sit down and push through the ridiculous chaos in my mind to some point of at least filling a page, but, as is the case now, that seems to be all it amounts to... just filling a page. A few weeks back, I briefly found a moment during Michael Ventura's reading at Book People, but I let it pass after struggling through a single paragraph. This was partly because the reading was over, the book signing had begun and an overzealous employee had immediately begun breaking down the audience seating, partly because the forty extra pounds I'm carrying these days had made the entire experience of sitting in a small folding chair wedged between a middle-aged fat man and a bookshelf incredibly uncomfortable, but mostly, it was due to the simple fact that I am out of the practice of forcing myself to write.
Ventura spoke of this during his reading. Once he made the decision that he was going to be a writer, he made himself write every day, and it has resulted in a long career of modest genius.
Michael Ventura's owned only one car his entire life: a green '69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon.
From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in "a kind of switchback journey in image and thought." His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and peopleand of course the car.
Ventura's distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well the Austin Sun, Psychotherapy Networker, and LA Weekly. In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays switch lanes with Hancock's evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God.
With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book's home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.
I spent the better part of six years in Lubbock, and during that time, I never felt comfortable or remotely inspired unless I knew I was on my way out, so it is strange to me that this guy, a relatively worldly and well connected, adventurous, beat inspired, liberal New York Jew has found himself at home in one of the most willfully ignorant, bigoted, barren, dust-blown holes I've ever known. There are undoubtedly a great many lengthy stories to explain that phenomenon, as he touched on at the reading, but I have to assume it lies largely in the idea that "it's the people that make the place". Along with his friends and sometime roommates, The Flatlanders, he was at the heart of a 1970's Cosmic Cowboy scene that led so many musicians and artists from west Texas to Austin. (In fact, I remember being down here in Austin about fifteen years ago, while still living in Lubbock, coming across a store called "Lubbock or Leave It". A shop dedicated to the musicians, authors, and artists who, once achieving a modicum of fame, got the hell out of there.) The weird thing is, Im pretty sure hes the only one who moved back