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Tickling Catfish A Texan Looks at Culture from Amarillo to Borneo by Jerry Craven |
Tall tales and "true stories" are mixed here with author Jerry Craven's mind-teasing musings on language and cultures that vary within themselves and are very varied from one hemisphere to another.
Starting with the culture and language of West Texas, Tickling Catfish builds its way surely through anecdotes and allusion into the ways of people elsewhere, from a street musician playing a leaf in Mexico City to a boa constrictor around the author's neck in Bangkok. And all the stories are told with an appropriate dose of sophisticated prairie humor.
"Languages the world over," Craven writes, "have picked up English words and made them their own by shifting the way they're said and changing the spelling. So it's hardly surprising to find in the vocabulary of the Texan a number of words that were borrowed from English." The phrase "hawging over a bob wire fence" is just one example.
Storytelling is an art, and the laconic art in this book exhibits a delicate balance of timing, rhythm, style, and content. The style is at once elegant and simple, a mixture of up-tempo phrasing and brief story lines that flow naturally to one of three conclusions: punchline, moral, or wish. The stories' common themes of customs, language, home, and human nature are not limited to a particular place but can be read as essays on language and its use against parochialism. Recognizable to readers anywhere, they will offer new, recent, or would-be Texans a cheerful companion in their quest for full Texas citizenship.
JERRY CRAVEN currently lives in Brookeland, Texas. He is author of ten books of nonfiction for children, three published collections of poetry, and numerous short stories in both literary journals and popular magazines, and for three years in the 1990s he wrote a weekly humor column for the Amarillo Daily News.
A Wardlaw Book
Holding Court on the Square
The Dead Boots of Borger
The Macho Art of Tickling Catfish
The Great Armadillo Grab
Hell Is Farther West
The Marlboro Man in Borneo
Stars on the Ceiling
Tickling Catfish
ISBN 0-89096-728-8 paper $14.95
LC 96-25540. 6x9. 160 pp. 15 line drawings.
Literary Nonfiction. Texana.
Publication Date: November 1996.
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