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Voice in the American West
If I Was a Highway
Michael Ventura owned only one car his entire a green ’69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in “a kind of switchback journey in image and thought.” His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and people—and of course the car. Ventura’s distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well as the Austin Sun , Psychotherapy Networker , and LA Weekly . In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays switch lanes with Hancock’s evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God. With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book’s home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.
260 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 2011
30 people want to read
About the author
Michael Ventura
30 books30 followersMichael Ventura is the author of WE'VE HAD A HUNDRED YEARS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE WORLD'S GETTING WORSE (with James Hillman) and LETTERS AT 3A.M.--REPORTS ON ENDARKENMENT. THE ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD is the first book of a trilogy titled THE TIGER, THE ROCK AND THE ROSE. Ventura has also embarked on a series of novels about Las Vegas. He divides his time between Austin and Los Angeles.
From the back of THE ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD.
From the back of THE ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 17, 2011
A collection of essays and musings by a Lubbock-based writer who is friends with one of my favorite musicians, Butch Hancock. Butch and the Flatlanders drift in and out of the stories, and Butch did the photographs for the book (and his song lyrics provided the title). I liked the author's approach to providing glimpses and flashes of real life America, his written pages the equivalent of driving west for hours, or hearing Butch Hancock in concert.
One favorite/sample paragraph:
"Goodbye to so many dreams. Most of them just got int he way of who you really are. Not that they weren't helpful. After all, your dreams are important not because they come true, but because they take you places you'd never have otherwise gone, and teach you what you never guessed was there to learn."
One favorite/sample paragraph:
"Goodbye to so many dreams. Most of them just got int he way of who you really are. Not that they weren't helpful. After all, your dreams are important not because they come true, but because they take you places you'd never have otherwise gone, and teach you what you never guessed was there to learn."
June 23, 2023
This journalist originally from New York befriends the Southwest—from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles; and, in turn, the Southwest seems to befriend him. In “A Life of Destinations,” Ventura says: “To be that man who only lives to live. That is my task from now on. It isn’t about writing anymore, or finding a meaning, or changing the world, or getting and keeping love, though all of that is important; but it isn’t about that stuff anymore. The task now is to be that man who only lives to live. For whom life, life, life, is enough” (15). What a great attitude!
As a Lubbockian (a term the author may have coined for no one I know uses it seriously), myself, I particularly liked Ventura’s essay, “Lubbockian Identity,” He begins this way: “Let us consider Lubbock Texas. In 1973, January through September, I lived in Lubbock—not a resident; a drifter, taking my time passing through. The Lubbockians I got to know all were Texans, mostly born and raised in Lubbock. Ethnically, most were some mixture of Anglo-Saxon-Celt, often with Cherokee stirred in a few generations back. Many traced their American ancestry to well before the Civil War” (35). But this delineation is only the beginning of Ventura’s portrayal of Lubbock—a place he likes more than he doesn’t. Will buy copies of this for friends who don’t live in Lubbock—just so they know I’m not entirely crazy for living here!
As a Lubbockian (a term the author may have coined for no one I know uses it seriously), myself, I particularly liked Ventura’s essay, “Lubbockian Identity,” He begins this way: “Let us consider Lubbock Texas. In 1973, January through September, I lived in Lubbock—not a resident; a drifter, taking my time passing through. The Lubbockians I got to know all were Texans, mostly born and raised in Lubbock. Ethnically, most were some mixture of Anglo-Saxon-Celt, often with Cherokee stirred in a few generations back. Many traced their American ancestry to well before the Civil War” (35). But this delineation is only the beginning of Ventura’s portrayal of Lubbock—a place he likes more than he doesn’t. Will buy copies of this for friends who don’t live in Lubbock—just so they know I’m not entirely crazy for living here!
October 19, 2011
Michael Ventura listens, chronicles, journals in the classic sense, with a distinct voice and an ear for music. He describes things as “terribly important,” and then he succeeds in explaining why: “…the pace at which she walked was terribly important. It changed Time (our sense of time, I mean). The doe’s steadiness… her apparent certainty about this particular moment… how she became the center of the moment for everyone, with all eyes on her, ours and the buck’s… how her motions seemed chosen yet not conscious, willed but without particular intent… how she seemed to enter and step through this moment, elongating it by the manner of her step—a manner that was somehow contagious…”
He speaks of risk: “…there is no risk without contact. People who don’t learn to risk can’t learn to live. This late-night Lubbock Elvis, he was risking a great deal, because there’s no telling what can happen on a darkened street anywhere, especially in the West, especially when you’re exposing yourself so vulnerably.”
... and music: “In the music of the Southwest, one image is constant: the road. … somebody is always arriving, always leaving, and there’s always something immeasurable juts past the outskirts of town.”
... and art: “It exists only to beckon us on a journey. And it can accompany us only as far as we’ve gone to meet it.”
He takes notes: “There’s lots to be seen all around us, most of which we cannot see. To know this intellectually is one thing; to feel it for a moment emotionally is quite another.”
He helps us to see a few more of those overlooked, yet terribly important things—things we can see but fail to see because we’re not paying the right kind of attention:
“It's as absurd to expect a life to have meaning, in contrast to the vastness of the Universe, as it is absurd to take off your shoe and hang it from a tree, but both are wonderful in their way—for I assure you, if you could see that tree, you’d think it wonderful, you’d approve, you’d think that in a wacko way something had been done, something worth doing.”
_If I Was a Highway_ What do you mean 'if'? Ventura, you *are* a highway, and having been a co-founder of the _LA Weekly_, you know this, sure as the Salvadoreno lunch truck that stopped in front of the paper's Silver Lake office daily.
He speaks of risk: “…there is no risk without contact. People who don’t learn to risk can’t learn to live. This late-night Lubbock Elvis, he was risking a great deal, because there’s no telling what can happen on a darkened street anywhere, especially in the West, especially when you’re exposing yourself so vulnerably.”
... and music: “In the music of the Southwest, one image is constant: the road. … somebody is always arriving, always leaving, and there’s always something immeasurable juts past the outskirts of town.”
... and art: “It exists only to beckon us on a journey. And it can accompany us only as far as we’ve gone to meet it.”
He takes notes: “There’s lots to be seen all around us, most of which we cannot see. To know this intellectually is one thing; to feel it for a moment emotionally is quite another.”
He helps us to see a few more of those overlooked, yet terribly important things—things we can see but fail to see because we’re not paying the right kind of attention:
“It's as absurd to expect a life to have meaning, in contrast to the vastness of the Universe, as it is absurd to take off your shoe and hang it from a tree, but both are wonderful in their way—for I assure you, if you could see that tree, you’d think it wonderful, you’d approve, you’d think that in a wacko way something had been done, something worth doing.”
_If I Was a Highway_ What do you mean 'if'? Ventura, you *are* a highway, and having been a co-founder of the _LA Weekly_, you know this, sure as the Salvadoreno lunch truck that stopped in front of the paper's Silver Lake office daily.
May 13, 2011
It took me a while to understand the writers tempo but yet I couldnt stop reading it. After awhile I got into his rythm and realized it was an interesting take on small town Americana. It was kind of written like the small essays from Readers Digest when I was a kid which maybe why I kind of liked it. It has a strong emphasis on the Lubbock area which is where the writer and also Butch Hancock who took the photos are from (along with Buddy Holly, Joe Ely and countless others).
all in all a good take on an old fashioned road trip.
all in all a good take on an old fashioned road trip.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews