Fifty-Year Old Books

Fifty years ago in 1960 was a memorable time in American Literature. Much has been made this year of the celebration of the publication then of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. While To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubted an important book, it’s not the book from 1960 that speaks most directly to me. The fifty-year old book that really speaks to me is John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Over the next month or so, as I lovingly and slowly read through Travels with Charley once again, I’ll be posting a number of pieces about Travels with Charley, but first I want to think a bit about why To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t speak to me as it does to so many people.

I think the answer is both simple and complicated. I’m from the North; not from the South. It isn’t that the North doesn’t share the United States’ long and sad history with the problems of race and slavery, it’s that the North doesn’t feel the issue with the same immediacy that the South does.
When John Steinbeck reaches the South in his Travels with Charley, he addresses this point.
“[A]head of me lay an area, the South, that I dreaded to see and yet knew I must see and hear. I am not drawn to pain and violence. I never gaze at accidents unless I can help, or attend street fights for kicks. I faced the South with dread. Here, I knew, were pain and confusion and all the manic results of bewilderment and fear. And the South being a limb of the nation, its pain spreads out to all America.”
Travels with Charley, p. 242.
I feel much the same as John Steinbeck. Progress has certainly been made since 1960, but all the pain isn’t yet gone. I feel it but somewhat at second hand. I don’t quite understand it with the directness that my Southern friends, both White and Black do. It’s like a long-running, bitter family feud and I’ve just married into the family. I know a cloud of unresolved conflict divides the family. I know it’s the most important thing to some members of my new family. I know it hurts me as well.

John Greenan

Christmas in July

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (“TDHCA”) may be a Grinch when it comes to making you work over the Holidays, but in July TDHCA plays Santa Claus.

I’m not sure I see the resemblance with the Chairman of the Board, Kent Conine, but sometimes the presents are even better:

Each year in the last week of July the TDHCA Board announces the projects that get tax credits—and usually get built—and the projects that don’t get tax credits and probably won’t get built.

The State of Texas is divided into thirteen regions for the competition—no superstitious people at the TDHCA I guess! The regions from sparsely populated rural areas with only enough money to fund one or two projects to the megaregions around Houston and North Texas where over $100 million may be at stake in the decision.
Here in Dallas, we’re in Region 3, which is highly competitive. Thirty-four projects have survived the seven-month long process to make it to the final decision. Only six or seven will get funded.
Twenty-seven or twenty-eight groups have spent many thousands of hours and probably more than $100,000 each on their tax credit applications and will get nothing. Six or seven groups will get credits worth millions of dollars.
It’s like playing the lottery, except it costs a lot more and your odds are better.
On Wednesday, July 28, 2010, I’ll be headed off to Austin to see if I get anything in my stocking. We’re involved in two applications and I’ll describe the projects over the next couple of days, but I’m hoping I’m not getting two lumps of coal.

John Greenan

Mark Cuban

Blog Maverick
Mark Cuban writes an interesting blog called blogmaverick. You can find it here: http://blogmaverick.com/. He’s often got interesting things to say and I’ve learned at least something about business from reading him.
Once and awhile, however, I read something that makes me realize just how different his world is from mine. His August 5 blog on his failed effort to buy the Texas Rangers has one of those passages:
It is not easy to get liquid to the point of $400mm dollars or more in just a few weeks.
Or, in my case, it would be easy in just a few lifetimes.

John P. Greenan

Arizona High Schools

Arizona High Schools To Now Teach Spanish Entirely In English

Stolen from The Onion (http://www.theonion.com/).
Finally, a language class I could handle.

John P. Greenan

Testing

testing

Life

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

Nick Sowell

Test Post

This is another test post.