Stayton Bonner

We've been living in Santa Fe for three weeks now. Here's a picture of our Great Dane Rufus checking out the snow outside our home. My work at Outside Magazine mostly consists of fact-checking. In his 2009 New Yorker article Checkpoints, John McPhee details the duties of a fact-checker. Most of your work is on the phone, learning the mathematics of international time zones. It's interesting stuff.

Former New Yorker and current New York Times Magazine head honcho fact-checker Sarah Harrison Smith lays it all out in The Fact Checker's Bible. I've got to admit this was not a book I'd envisioned myself curling up with next to a fire. But it's interesting stuff. Smith delineates how the U.S. press is privileged with a Constitutional Right to free press, as opposed to most other countries. But with that privilege comes responsibility to ensure periodicals get it right. For one thing, it lessens the reputation of a magazine to print retractions for errors-in-print. Who's going to believe you if you keep getting it wrong? For another thing, you don't want to publish misinformation about someone—particularly if it involves sexual or legal indiscretions—without having done your homework. In the legal world, that's called libel. And it's not something with which the magazine wants to deal.

Wells Tower has a new article on Venice in Outside's April 2010 issue. I've been reading his short story collection, (just out in paperback,) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It's deserving of the praise. His writing reminds me of Tom Franklin's 2000 story collection Poachers. These guys are visceral and darkly funny.

Speaking of which, Catherine and I spent a couple hours last night in the dark confines of the Santa Fe Brewery listening to my old friend and Lost Highways recording artist Hayes Carll. He played a great set to a packed house. He was my last interview for the college newspaper, eight years ago. I caught him as Billy Joe Shaver's opening act at Austin's Cactus Cafe. Which I hear is now being closed in UT's budget cuts. Couldn't they borrow some money from Mack Brown to keep this musical institution going? Go to Save the Cactus Cafe and let your voice be heard.

Click here to read my review of Nacogdoches-based author Joe R. Lansdale's most recent novel Vanilla Ride. Having grown up in East Texas—behind the Pine Curtain, as they say—the Texas Observer has had me cover the region several times. It's interesting to reevaluate the place of my birth after not living there for 15 years. East Texas is beautiful. Black bear and white heron congregate around murky lakes under dense pine forests. The region is also financially poor since the dwindling of oil jobs, leaving plenty of angry rednecks and mean old ladies.

But you can find that anywhere.

East Texas is a strange place. Part Deep South and part Texas. It's kind of hard to pinpoint. Although I don't think his writing is always top-notch, Lansdale captures the region well as a native son. His sci-fi, western, or noir stories are most notable for their sharp and often hilarious dialogue.

Michael Dougan—a Seattle-based cartoonist who had a short-lived MTV series—also nails the Piney Woods in his graphic novel memoir East Texas: Tales From Behind the Pine Curtain. Dougan should do more graphic novels. His work is great.

 The media often portrays East Texas incorrectly. A melting pot of race, the region is more pragmatically egalitarian than conflict-ridden. It's a humid sleepy place where folks work hard, drink beer on Saturday night, (Baptists usually do this behind closed doors,) and then go to church on Sunday morning. I can't say that I'd now choose to live behind the Pine Curtain, but I'm glad to be from there.

My wife and I recently attended the Texas Bigfoot Conference in Tyler. As published in the Texas Observer, the story may be read here. I now carry a flashlight at night...

Texas Parks and Wildlife published my article on the Great Plains' lesser prairie chicken. It's a beautiful bird—grouse to be exact—with an unfortunate name. You may read it here. 

My friend Jerod Foster took the pictures. They and the magazine look fantastic. It's one of the best aesthetic presentations of anything I've worked on to date.

The story's Goodnight/Loving aspect was a lucky fluke. I was put in touch with Jeff Haley during research and interviewed him over the phone. Jerod then drove to his house outside Pampa for the photo shoot and noticed all these books by historian J. Evetts Haley in his library.

"That's my granddad," Jeff said. 

As it turned out, I was reading J. Evetts Haley's biography of Charles Goodnight at the time. Upon learning of the link, I saw a parallel between Goodnight's buffalo herd and the nearly endangered lesser prairie chicken and incorporated it into the story. It made the whole thing come together. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Jerod and I are currently working on another TPWD story about catch-and-release shark fishing along the Gulf Coast. I'll be watching from the boat as he takes the underwater shots.

I enjoy shopping at Central Market or Whole Foods as much as the next guy. The sepia tones, the hip music, (much better than the Cheap Trick muzak playing at HEB,) and the free samples. Yes, definitely the free samples. How many mango salsas have been bought on a spur-of-the-moment whim?

The food tastes great. But those trips are more for the experience. If you put me to a blind taste test between organic and non-organic vegetables, I'd be guessing.

In his recent Time magazine article Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food, Bryan Walsh writes that cheap, (i.e. mass-produced,) food is "increasingly bad for us" and the "principal cause of America's obesity epidemic".

I don't argue with Mr. Walsh that there's an obesity epidemic. Read Elizabeth Kolbert's well-written New Yorker piece XXXL. But I do find fault with his logic. Cheap food doesn't make people fat. Nobody's making you eat that Quarter-Pounder, (although Ronald McDonald does have a creepily hypnotic hold on worldwide youth. Maybe it's the red fro.) Saying that cheap food causes obesity is like attributing paranoia to 24-hour news channels. If you watch shootings and celebrity reality shows all day, then you might never leave the house. Or you might get Botox. But you don't have to watch TV in the first place. (Except for The Simpsons reruns.)

Walsh then goes on to describe the practices necessary to produce large amounts of cheap food. It ain't pretty. Pigs are crammed into feedlots. Antibiotics are administered like warm beers at a frat party. This is a far cry from the Jeffersonian pastoral vision. Pumping animals with antibiotics may result in bugs that eventually resist those antibiotics. This is done in the name of efficiency. It's how you pay less for that saran-wrapped pork at the supermarket. 

Walsh compares the large-scale food production industry with a utopian vision of organics. Bill Niman's cattle eat "all natural, non-corn diet" on green fields overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco. Walsh believes that this method "gets it right". Uh-huh. How many farmers can afford property overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco? The costs involved with maintaining that level of organic food production is not "sustainable" for a country of this size.

There is a place for organics within this country as there is a place for non-organic food. Walsh should have focused on a more realistic organic farm situation than the million dollar Pacific Ocean view. I like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. These were necessary whistle-blowers for corrupt systems. But commercial food production is not corrupt. It's necessary for keeping this country supplied with reliable cheap food. Have you ever tried gardening? It's hard work. I sure don't want to come home and fool with it.

In a radio interview with "Agritalk", Walsh states that the Time article was an "opinion" piece. But nowhere was it stated that this was a writer's opinion. Most people will, (a) never listen to the "Agritalk" interview and (b) think that the article was objective truth.

This is more scary than Ronald McDonald's pied-piper routine, (well, almost.) As our society becomes increasingly more urban, we are farther removed from the realities of agriculture.