Manny Fernandez's essay in The New York Times, "What Makes Texas Texas," is a deeply insightful exploration of the state's larger-than-life quality, and larger-than-life hold on Texans:

People throughout the state say they believe that their way of life is under assault and that they are making a kind of last stand by simply being Texan. It is this fear, anger and sometimes paranoia that lurks beneath the surface of Texas politics and that underlies the expansion of gun rights, the reflexive antagonism toward Washington, and the opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that seems essential for succeeding in state politics these days. Senator Ted Cruz's remarks dismissing New York values at a Republican debate should come as no surprise. That's how people from the last best place talk about other places. But Texas is not under attack. It is merely changing as America changes with it. It is a majority-minority state that has become increasingly diverse and nonwhite — rural Texas is shrinking while urban and suburban Texas is expanding — and the tension between what Texas is and what it was has come to define the state.

Fernandez's observation that, "You don't just move to Texas. It moves into you," is on the money, as is his conclusion that Texas resists America's growing transience. "It declares, to itself and the nation: Place matters. America needs a superstate, or to put it another way, an antistate. Sometimes we love it here and sometimes we are disgusted here, but, to twist Gertrude Stein's line about Oakland, Calf., there is a here here."

Gray Matters contributor Cort McMurray gets at that same duality, part captivating, part aggravating, in his wonderful essay about our city, "Nobody Chooses Houston":

Nobody chooses Houston. But when you end up here, if you let it, Houston tattoos itself onto you. It's indelible, inescapable. Houston, sweaty and jangly, always changing, always taking on more of us, Asian and African, Latino and upstate New Yorker, all of us blasting down Highway 59, always aggravating, always just a little bit unlovable, always exactly where we need to be.



McMurray's reverie on Houston's most important symbol, the Astrodome, is also a must read for anyone, like Fernandez, struggling to figure this place out:

The Dome wasn't the source of Houston's boom years. Oil did that, and NASA, to a lesser extent. It wasn't the reason that Houston was one of the few North American cities to remain largely peaceful during the Long Hot Summer of 1967. Community leaders and local businessmen had quietly begun working to desegregate the city long before the ground was broken on Kirby Drive. The Dome was the plastic-grassed token of that boom and of that movement toward equality, a symbol to the world that here was a place audacious enough to do the outrageous. In Houston, everything was possible.



I asked our impresario, Lisa Gray, if Fernandez's piece called to mind other memorable essays about our beloved, not-to-be-messed-with state. Here's what she sent back, under the heading, Texas Reading List:

"The God Abandons Texas," the introduction to Larry McMurtry's book of essays "In a Narrow Grave." (The whole books is terrific.) McMurtry confidently pronounces that the age of Texas exceptionalism is dead:

Apparently there as a time in the forties and fifties that people enjoyed reading about Texas, if the reading was light enough. The state was thought to be different--another country almost. It had Nieman-Marcus and the Alamo and a lot of endearing millionaires.... Alas, all is changed. We aren't thought of as quaintly vulgar anymore. Some may find us dangerously vulgar, but most just find us boring.

He was wrong, of course. That didn't last.

"The Super-American State" by John Bainbridge. (Also the title of Bainbridge's best-selling book). The mythos of oil-rich Texas -- a free-wheeling place where any wildcatter can strike it big:

It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look at Texas with an air of amused condescension. This attitude, though not heartily relished by Texans, is historically appropriate, for Texas is a new boy, standing in relation to the rest of the United States as the United States stands to Europe, or, for that matter, as Rome stands to Athens, and since time began new boys have been subject to the elaborate patronization of old boys.

"Is Texas America?" by Molly Ivins, Nov. 17, 2003:

How come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them? After all these years, I do not think it is my fault. The fact is, it's a damned peculiar place. Given all the horseshit, there's bound to be a pony in here somewhere. Just by trying to be honest about it, one accidentally underlines its sheer strangeness.

"The Mildcatters," by Mimi Swartz, July 2005:

If you have lived in Houston for a certain period of time—since the oil boom of the late seventies, say—it is nearly impossible to avoid feeling your pulse quicken whenever oil and gas prices look to be headed for an extended uptick, as they seem to be right now. The more that energy gloom and doom settles upon the world—the war in Iraq, the much-threatened collapse of the Saudi government, the success of books like Paul Roberts's The End of Oil—the more a certain segment of Houston edges toward euphoria, even though it is supposed to remember what happened last time. A story in the Houston Chronicle's business section on April Fools' Day, for instance, carried the jubilant (for Houston's oil sector) subtitle "Report raises prospect of oil reaching $100," but it also contained an uncharacteristic concern for the dangers of a worldwide recession that might be caused by a "super spike" in prices. That conflict, in a nutshell, is Houston today: Post-bust and post-Enron, the city is trying on a brand-new mood: cautious ecstasy.