Until this moment I never heard of REH Days. It's a surreal experience. REH was a major part of my teen years and I carried him into my 20s, but then moved on into all the other spectra of life. For decades I did not read a single book but I also kept every single one. And now all of a sudden I find people who are even more into it than I ever was. Surreal, like the echos of a path not taken.REH is Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan and author of a whole bunch of other good stuff until he shot himself in a moment of despair. He had a lot of potential he never met: He died at 30.
Well, forgive me for being a snob, but all those "other spectra of life" were engaging enough that REH Days looks about as alluring as the Callahan County Fair. (Callahan County is a perfect square just east of Abilene, TX, 900 square miles, 13,000 people. Howard's home town is down in the corner. Yes, county fairs can be a lot of fun, but.) Here's the official description of events:
The Best Two Days in Howard Fandom officially starts on Friday the 7th, runs through Saturday the 8th and is chock full of All Things Howard! The Robert E. Howard Museum is open to all from 9 to 4 each day; buy REH items in the Gift Shop; purchase Howard books directly from the REH Foundation Press; you can listen to our GOH Tim Truman talk about his involvement with Ol’ Two-Gun Bob Howard; you can take a Bus Tour of Cross Plains and the surrounding countryside; a total of seven panels will be presented (one at the Ice House where REH mixed it up!); we have a REH Swap Meet at the Pavilion; there’s a Celebration Banquet and a way-cool Silent Auction; the Cross Plains Post Office will stamp your mail with a Howard Days cancellation postmark; you can enjoy some real Texas vittles at the Caddo Peak Ranch Barbeque,; read or listen to REH Porchlight Poetry; view original Howard typescripts and a great collection at the Cross Plains Library – whew, it’s one of those exhausting weekends that makes you glad to be a fan of Robert E. Howard!Yeah. Pretty sure if heckling readers at the Porchlight Poetry session didn't pan out I'd be looking real close at the 173 mile run down to Austin.
-- rehupa.com
Don't get me wrong, there's some lovely country down there. I presume the scenery in The Whole Wide World is true for that part of the world. And when I took the train through southern Texas the low rocky hills were pretty cool to see and made me think of Howard and his penchant for driving through the countryside, pistol in hand, looking out for imagined enemies. But he was kind of a nut, and fans who'd travel so far for such a gathering are probably kind of nuts too.
12 comments:
Rereading, it's clear I'm just looking to party and not all that much into the scholarship. I'm leading my life backwards. :-)
Some as might say that folks who'd travel so far to gather in an utterly inhospitable environment, up where God lost his socks, build a city and tear it down again in a week are nuts.
What's one nut to another, I ask?
Google says "You will be asked to sign in" but then it publishes my comment without asking me. I never did like how Google incorporated Blogger stuff into their code.
Not that I'm hiding. I just like being a lizard, y'know?
I kind of like the way Cross Plains, TX, is laid out so logically in an almost perfect grid. You can't get lost. North-south streets Avenues A through F, as you go east to west through town, and number streets SW and SE 1st through 8th, NW and NE 1st through 9th. Granted, you would just have to memorize the named streets, but at least they are all tree names. The fire department, library and post office are all centrally located, as is the First Baptist Church. They have put the city government in its place, in a brick building slightly smaller than Cowboy Pump & Supply LTD, (254-725-7158) down the street.
There is nothing there to dampen the flame of the imagination.
By Crom!
It's fun to crawl around maps. Cross Plains is not what I'm used to because it doesn't appear to have ever changed or grown. The Robert E. Howard Museum, his family home, is not crowded by development and is still on the edge of town. Weird. It's like Dixon, CA, if Dixon was in central Texas instead of on the road between San Francisco and Sacramento.
I would love to put on my Hunter S. Thompson hat and go to the Barbarian Festival with its t-shirts and sunburns and tractor pulls and funnel cakes. Jayziz.
Barbarian Festival, like a poor man's Burning Man, only they set fire to the Cowboy Pump and Supply building.
Not on purpose, though. By accident.
Looks to me like just another generic small town fair thrown in honor of whatever the city council can use for justification. If I showed up with a broadsword I'd probably get arrested. Wait, it's Texas, maybe not. I'll just get arrested for my long barbarian warrior hair.
It's all fun and games until someone gets their head severed.
I think you're right, Don -- just an excuse to latch onto some tourism. What in hell does Bumfuck, Texas have to do with Cimmeria? The latter is where Howard went to get the hell OUT of there.
small town fair thrown in honor of whatever
Anthropologically speaking--it's what humans in groups always do, right? Harvest, solstice, the day the big rock from the sky came down and killed the chief. Women cooking, young ladies giggling, boys making lots of noise while they check out the young ladies, old farts acting important. Hell yeah.
I don't see why we need to apologize for wanting our non-working time to be fun, light, entertaining, whatev. I joined a philosophy meetup the other month and promptly dropped it because, while it was fun reading a short essay and chatting with the peeps about stuff... when it came time to start a Serious Book, I was all mehhhhhhhhhhh.
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