I’m taking off in the morning (Monday), on another flight to D/FW, renting a car, and heading up to Oklahoma City for a reading/signing, and then out west from there to do three more (Portland, Seattle, Bellingham) and then back east to St. Louis for another. I’m gone 10 days this time, then home, then to New York, then to L.A., then home again.

I miss Michael when I’m off like this. He says it’s no big deal to live in the center of (and get left behind by) the Hank Stuever Show, but I can only imagine how quickly it wears thin. Keep in mind — he’s lived with this book as much as I have for the last three or four years. This song makes me think of how soon the Tinsel stuff will be over (would you buy a book about the suburbs and Christmas in January?), and how Michael and I will be flying away on Dec. 25 to sunny California for the holidays, to be with each other for a week and do nothing that has anything to do with book promotion or our jobs. I play this song over and over and think of that.

Tinsel is getting good press — and I’m grateful, even if I’ve been slow to get it posted up here. So I’m spending part of this sunny Sunday making a round-up of the last several days of my media hype machine. It’s getting harder and harder to get MSM attention for a book, but my luck is holding out, and I’m even getting notice from some non-MSM. Whether any of it makes a whit of difference in actual number of books sold remains (as always) to be seen. …

I am elated about this Laura Miller review in Salon. I’ve long admired her book reviews (and no, I don’t know her) and I’m so glad that she liked the book and got it exactly. I’ll be keeping this review handy for the inevitable day when I’m feeling low about the whole endeavor, which should come any minute now. I especially like the opening:

Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer’s desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a portrait of the holiday as it’s celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, “Tinsel” is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon.

Another goody: Here’s Robert Smith’s story on the book that ran on All Things Considered on NPR Saturday (Nov. 28). I had a great time with Robert and producer Alice Winkler at Tyson’s Corner Center taping this piece a couple of weeks ago. And here’s a picture of Robert and me visiting the Tyson’s Santa Claus that day. This particular Santa is quite popular, and has been there every Christmas for many years. Last year he lost his job when the mall changed photo vendors and there was a huge outcry and protest. He’s back. (And he’s not afraid of speaking out. While Robert and I sat there and talked to him, he reminded us that “God gave his only son to mankind,”  “the ultimate gift,” and other evangelical yada-yada, which I think is sort of a no-no for secular mall Santas, but there it is. Happy Holidays and Merry CHRIST-mas!)

Speaking of radio, I had a great time appearing the other morning on the Joy Cardin show on Wisconsin Public Radio. No, readers, I wasn’t actually in Milwaukee; I talked to them from the Post‘s extremely handy radio studio.

I’ve been quoted in a few stories, like this one from the Deseret News, about the holiday season and buy-buy-buy and commercialism. Economist/author Joel Waldfogel (author of Scroogenomics) and I seem to be destined to appear in a lot of stories together.

(Disturbing print trend, if you’ll notice, and more fodder for the “death of copyediting” files: I seem to be able to get my name spelled right in the first reference — it’s Stuever –but soon enough I become “Steuver” on second references and in photo captions. I had journalism profs who would flunk people for this, but I am not in the business of handing out F’s to anyone giving my book a shred of publicity. I’ve spelled my name to everyone I talk to, and gave some of these writers the only handy way to remember how to spell it that I’ve been able to come up with, besides spending beaucoup money on a web site with my accurately-spelled name splayed all over it AND having that linked from inaccurately-spelled Google searches. Anyhow, here is a surefire method to remember how to spell my name: You want “ever” to be in it. Like forever. And however, and whatever. STU-EVER. But you don’t want to say it like that. TV and radio people always ask how to pronounce it, since they generally want to take it in the “Stoyver” direction. It’s Stooooover. “It rhymes with J. Edgar Hoover” I say.)

Jeff Baker gets my name right and then some in the Oregonian. Nice piece, which ran in plenty of time to interest people in my Powell’s reading there on Friday, Dec. 4.

And I liked reading columnist, “storyteller, writer and central Ohio supply preacher” Jeff Gill’s thoughts in the Newark Advocate.

Onward, to good reviews in today’s Sunday papers: St. Petersburg Times here, and the Buffalo News here.

Also a nice little story in the Oklahoma Gazette, the alt-weekly in OKC, which makes mention of my ancient history: I was the unpaid summer intern at the Gazette in 1988. Fond memories of Randy Splaingard and Ken “Dee Dee LeDeux” Siens and the drunken night known as the “Best of OKC” issue party, held at that old rock n’roll sushi bar over on May Avenue. What was that place called?

Some more making the Yuletide gay-ness from Pink magazine (click on the dude to get a PDF version of the magazine). And in a whole other demographic, here’s Brit Mott’s story from Plano Profile magazine, including a nice picture taken at their offices/studio in October.

Finally, and mostly, if you’re in Dallas (and not thoroughly sick of me) you must pick up the December issue of D, which has a big excerpt from the book and features an amazing portrait of Tammie Parnell in her family room with heaps of Christmas finery and regalia, photographed by Misty Keasler. The excerpt is mostly about Tammie — I took some 20,000 words of the Tammie parts of the book and winnowed them down into just a taste (5,000 words) about Tammie’s world of Christmas decorating and what it means to her. Tim Rogers and his staff are a bunch of super smarties, and I’ve enjoyed getting to work with them. I’ve also enjoyed meeting them a time or two at the Old Monk for their customary cocktail hour.

The excerpt appears only in the print edition, but here’s an outtake from the photo session that Misty sent to Tammie and Tammie sent to me — it’s Tammie and her dog, Toby. If that won’t put you in a Tinsel-y holiday mood, whatever will?

Tinsel opens and (nearly) ends with Black Friday, an American cultural event about which I am ambivalent. My opinion has changed since I began work on the book. Obviously people aren’t out there doorbusting for bargains alone. They’re out there to participate in something that feels large. They are grasping at their own sense of tradition and community — in a box-store realm that often seems to run short of things like cultural roots, authenticity. As I write in the book, Black Friday is like our running of the Pamplona bulls. It lacks the quaintness and Hemingway-esque machismo of the Spanish festival, but for the Black Friday crazies, it has that same instant of thrill and melee. (And if you know anything about the history of Christmas — which has its origins as a solstice bacchanal, with wild partying in the public streets — then maybe Black Friday resembles the real spirit of Christmas more than a church service?) That Black Friday is entirely the invention of the retail industry is both disturbing and pointless. I think it’s also a little bit Woodstock. Remember this about Woodstock: people didn’t know they were going to a monumental cultural event. They just wanted to be part of the crowd.

For all the economic analysis and moral tut-tutting that accompanies Black Friday, I think once you’re out there in it, you realize that it’s about something having to do with the human heart. Connection, competition, love, insanity, activity, sport — those things.

And what better day to share with you some of the results (so far) of my Christmas Shopping Survey? The survey has been up since the midsummer day that my site went live. Since then, about 1,200 visitors have taken it. It asks about Christmas spending and shopping but also a lot of emotional questions about Christmas, such as feelings about giving/receiving, belief in Santa, TV specials, seasonal ennui, etc. — some of which, the shopping stuff, I’ll share today, and some of which I’ll save for later.

The results are by no means scientific. There’s no way to keep people from taking the survey more than once, and because it’s anonymous I have no data on where the respondents are from or information like age, gender, income, religious belief, etc.

Nevertheless, as Wee-Wee McCall might say: I’m intrigued.

This year, surveys of consumer/citizens found that people are going to keep their spending the same or a little less than last year. Very generally speaking, Americans spend around $850-$900 on Christmas presents. In question number 1, I asked people if that number seemed about right.

47 percent said yes, that seems right.

29 percent said they spend way LESS than that.

14 percent said they spend MORE. (9 percent claimed to do no Christmas spending at all. Believe that!)

So I asked people what they generally spend on the holiday booty, and I asked people to consider not just the presents they buy for spouses, partners, children and extended family, but all the other presents too (for friends, co-workers, employees, etc.)

51 percent said they spend between $500 and $1,000.

32 percent said they spend under $500

12 percent spend between $1,000 and $2,000

And 5 percent said they spend more than $2,000 but not more than $5,000. (One percent said they spend more than $10,000! Oh, Michael — you shouldn’t have!)

I’m also curious about people’s feelings toward shopping itself — going to the mall, etc. I asked: Which statement best describes your attitude toward Christmas shopping?

37 percent took the easiest (and I guess most accurate) answer: I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it — I get some good feelings out of it, but I also myself questioning why it has to be done.

19 percent said: It feels me with existential dread.

But another 19 percent seemed unfazed: I’ve got it down to a science so that it doesn’t irritate me. I’m very efficient.

9 percent said they LOVE it, all of it — the malls, the crowds, the sounds, the chaos. (I almost picked this answer too.)

8 percent said they are so good at it, so efficient, that they are done way before the holiday season crowds.

8 percent said they get a little bit of the existential dread while in the parking lot, but once they’re actually inside the mall, they’re good to go. (That’s how I feel!)

I asked people how much they spend on their children at Christmastime. For whatever reason, 44 percent of my respondents do not have children. Maybe that’s because (ahem) my book appeals to smarty urbanized hipsters who are too young and cool to have succumbed to the reproductive imperative. Haha! But, of the parents who’ve taken the survey…

26 percent say they spend between $100 and $300 per kid.

8 percent said they spend between $300 and $700 per kid.

Another 8 percent said they don’t set a limit, because the kids ask for different things from year to year. Some of these may have also agreed with the idea that it’s Christmas, fer cryin’ out loud, and the joy on their kids’ faces didn’t need to stay within budget.

One percent said they spend more than $700 on their kids. Lucky ducks.

There’s more results to come! Before Christmas, I’ll share how people feel about the gifts they give and receive, and also the results about family gift-giving, gift cards, holiday TV specials, and the aftermath of Christmas. If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please do!

Have a safe but still totally insane Black Friday…

It so happens that I wound up in Houston on the Monday night that the Texans were playing the Tennessee Titans, which, I gather from the traffic jams on the way to my reading at Brazos Books, was a big game for Houstonites. They lost. I care about that about this much, but I could have done without the gridlock, you sports-obsessed America, you.

Just when I was thinking maybe I should have set up a folding table with a stack of Tinsels in the Reliant Stadium parking lot instead, I edged into the bookstore to find a nice little crowd of 15 or so people – which, according to ever-optimistic Megan (my HMH publicist) is a good size in a town where we got little to no advance media interest. Brazos Books isn’t large, but it’s a cute and interesting store, and there’s a comfy couch and chairs. I put on my gold Burger King Wise Man crown and went to work!

Jeff Trykoski’s brother, Doug, and his wife Traci came to the reading – Traci is very pregnant, due in February; a Trykoski grandchild at last!

Also present was a goodly portion of a writing class from the nearby DeVry University, which was a total surprise, and a welcome one. Their teacher, one LouAnn Gottschalk, thought it would be a good idea to go see an actual writer talk about an actual book. I couldn’t agree more and I enjoyed meeting LouAnn and her students. Also in the audience was Facebook acquaintance Mark Hager. Plus some random readers who, it would seem, were just interested the book and the author. Go figure. (Thanks, LouAnn for the photos!)

Most delightfully, I got to see Janice Welch (nee Kusbel) and her husband, James, and daughter Gabrielle. Janice and I were inseparable back in high school days, but we haven’t actually seen one another in – I added it up – just shy of 20 years. We’d lost track of one another until about 2005, when Janice’s parents saw me on the Today show one morning. So I got to have dinner with them – and meet James and the amazing Gabrielle. (I’ve been an admirer of her Halloween costumes for many years, thanks to Janice’s e-mails and pictures. Once she was Velma from Scooby-Doo, then the next year she was Daphne. This year she was Gene Simmons in full Kiss makeup.) Gabrielle asked me to sign Off Ramp, too, which she is currently reading (she is in fifth grade, people!).

After the reading, James and Gabrielle went home and Janice and I went out for drinks with David Bryce, a friend of mine from the Austin days who is now an attorney in Houston. Do you ever have one of those moments where you’re sitting a table with two people who come from completely different phases of your life? I was worried about being a bridge between them, but I need not have worried: David Bryce is interested in everything and able to talk about anything; so’s Janice! We sat on the porch at a bar called Under the Volcano. Every once in awhile, beneath a top note of another table’s cigarette smoke, I got a tropical whiff of … something, some plant … magnolia? Honeysuckle? I can only describe that smell thusly: New Orleans at night. Whatever grows there grows in Houston.

Tuesday was a long but wonderful day. I got up and drove out to the Houston suburbs to see Janice some more. Gabrielle was at school, but her son, Nathan, was home. I’ve heard a lot about Nathan. He’s autistic. Really autistic. I wasn’t sure what to expect – Janice has devoted her life to teaching and caring for Nathan, who goes to a special one-on-one school for a couple hours of day. When I got there, I was immediately struck by what beautiful and mysterious boy he is. I could have watched them together all day — a mesmerizing mother-son pair. They sit in the morning and work on Nathan’s communication skills. There are moments that are absolutely divine and moments that are tense. This is Janice’s life – and James’s and Gabrielle’s. It’s not only about constantly trying to reach Nathan, but it involves a rigid, completely organic dietary regimen and a household routine where life can only be lived a few minutes at a time.

I wonder if people ever tell Janice that she’s lucky? Because that’s what I felt for her. I know it’s not easy, but he really is one of the most fascinating, handsome and interesting kids I’ve ever seen. And right away I liked Gabrielle, who seems wise beyond her years. For all the unpredictability in their lives, their house is really comfortable and easy to be in. I’m so glad I had time to visit.

But I had to go. Left Janice’s place at 12:30 to drive like Jehu for 3-1/2 hours to get to Dallas and catch a flight home – but found just enough time to have an early dinner at the Black Eyed Pea with Louis and John and my mother. I’m on the plane right now (Tuesday night) as I type this. What a week. I saw miles and miles of Texas and did five readings.

Are you waiting to hear whether or not I’ll be on the CBS Early Show in New York on Black Friday? Well, so am I. After I told everyone about it, the producer who was supposed to call just never got around to it. Lesson learned, I suppose. Maybe I’ll hear about it Wednesday, or maybe they’ll have me on some other morning before Christmas gets here. In any case, our Thanksgiving is in limbo.

Meantime, there’s some more Tinsel press, reviews, radio and TV coming. I’m reading/speaking at the Newseum on Saturday afternoon (Nov. 28) if you want to come out and join the museum crowds. (The Newseum person told me it’s their busiest day of the year.) Something to do with bored relatives!

Also, unless their plan has changed, I think there’s a story about Tinsel on NPR’s All Things Considered on Saturday. We taped it a couple of weeks ago in Tyson’s Corner Center mall. I’ll doublecheck and let the world know.

I get back on a plane Monday morning: Readings next week in Oklahoma City (Dec. 1), Portland (Dec. 4) and Bellingham (Dec. 5). Then it’s Seattle, St. Louis and New York between Dec. 7-14. Go to the home page and click “Hank’s Next Event” if you want the details.

In other news…

City Paper called on me (and Trey Graham! Among others) to help make sense of the difference (and vitality) of the Washington Blade (RIP) and Metro Weekly. What I’ll miss about the Blade was its dogged accounting of worldwide and nationwide discriminations, slights, crimes and other injustices to gays and lesbians everywhere. It was a constant reminder (sometimes a dreary one; but necessary) that every step forward for gay rights in one time zone usually entailed a step backward in another.

And the Post has decided to close its Los Angeles, Chicago and New York bureaus. You can read about it here. This move acknowledges how, bit by bit, the Post has been scaling back its ambitions as a national newspaper in favor of keeping our foreign bureaus and emphasizing a focus on all things Washington. I spent quite a bit of time with the LA bureau in its recent permutations in the last 10 years — Bill Booth, who is now the Mexico City bureau chief; Rene Sanchez, who is now a managing editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Sharon Waxman, now of the The Wrap.com; my TV colleague Lisa de Moraes; and the most recent LA chief, Karl Vick – and I plan to keep going out to Los Angeles for various stories. All those Oscar seasons and other datelines I’ve had from SoCal, my idea of a bureau was pretty much a discounted room at the Beverly Hilton anyhow.

But as for the actual bureau, I’ll always remember seeing Florence Henderson. and other B-listers on their way to see one of a squillion attorneys, on the elevators of the Century City office building where we were for a long time – that was before the Washington Post Company started saving money by moving the bureau in with the Newsweek offices in Santa Monica.

If anyone wants to hire a top-flight young reporter, you can’t do better than Ashley Surdin, our LA bureau aide who is now out of a job. Here’s to you, Ashley. Hang in there.

Forgot to mention a very special guest who showed up at my Book People reading in Austin: Carl Anderson, PhD, a UT prof. If you live in Dallas, however, you know him as somebody else, starting about this time every year at NorthPark Mall.

Carl was in a purple tie-dye T-shirt on Saturday, but I’d recognize him anywhere. Here’s a picture of us at NorthPark back in 2006. He bought a copy of my book and said he was very interested in reading it. I hope he likes it, or I’m going to have a little too much coal.

If you’ve been reading this blog or if you know me even just a little, then you know that when it comes to memory and the past and driving around I can be a total sap. Fair warning, then. Move on or get in the passenger seat…

I lived in Austin for just a bit longer than three years — from 1996 to 1999, which was sort of like the roaring ’20s in that town, the decade everyone and everything became unbearably hip and people got rich just by being in the right action-figure-adorned cubicle farm internet start-up company at the exact right time. Being here this weekend really made it seem like forever ago.

Part of my nostalgia jag on this weekend was triggered by how much Austin has changed in terms of infrastructure (freeways, roads) and architecture (Christ, how many loft condos does a city need?). The pic above is one of those utopian developer photoshoppy-jobbies — but it’s pretty close to a fully realized vision. The smell of progress is also evident in the palpably increased density of restaurants, boutiques, and other places to spend money and pack on the fat grams. No city in America is better served by outdoor-seating-under-strings-of-Italian-wedding-lights opportunities. Austin may well be the most delicious city I’ve ever left behind (although Albuquerque puts up a pretty good fight).

More than one Austinite I encountered this weekend bemoaned what the city has become — the growth, the pace, the conspicuous consumption — but that’s always been a chief activity in Austin: complaining that it was so much better back in [fill in idyllic year here]. But I think Austin looks and feels better now, somehow. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and what I experienced this weekend felt like Austin Plus-Plus.

The basic quality of the place (happily dumpy, rusty, and stoney in more than one sense) is still intact, and so is the boundless civic pride. People have always loved living here; although it’s famous for being “laid back,” life in Austin requires of its people the most competitive style of laid-backitude. People hurl themselves into the weekend with gusto, determined to out-Austin one another: they are jogging around Town Lady Bird Lake early in the day; they are lined up for just the right breakfast tacos and brunch hot spots by 10; they are tailgating in deluxe style by noon before the UT game; they are in and out of all the right bars and night spots and arrive at favorite eateries with the reverence of hipster pilgrims. And they’re still record shopping, which gladdens me.

They’re also still voracious readers. Hooray! I read from and signed copies of Tinsel on Saturday afternoon at Book People, the lit’rature palace on West 6th and Lamar. I can only begin to guess how many hours I spent in this store back in the ’90s, fully absorbed in magazines and books. (More on that — my happily delusional, late-20s, literary life of letters back then — in a moment.)

Around 20-30 people showed up. Many of them were friends, including former colleagues from the Austin American-Statesman. Some were stray customers. More than a few were curious about the book, lured there by one hell of an article about by Patrick Beach, which ran in the Statesman on Saturday morning. More on that, too, in a moment — but here’s a snippet:

We have been here before, sort of but not really: Big-city journalist parachutes into Anywhere, USA, observes the curious folkways and mores of People Not Like Himself, writes a piece posing as fish out of water with tone of bemused detachment, which aims to fumigate persistent aroma of condescension toward his subjects.

Except this is my friend Hank Stuever, a prince of a guy, former American-Statesman writer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, brutally funny, warm and generous and a better writer than I could ever hope to be. I hate him.

Let us dispense with the notion of journalistic impartiality and the use of surnames on second reference and call the man whose talent I’m murderously jealous of “Hank.” And let’s talk about Hank’s new book, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” which is about three Christmases — and three households — in the Dallas exburb of Frisco from 2006 to 2008. It’s also about consumerism, an economy that conveniently imploded and red-state Americans who go to churches where they’re told “God wants you to feel good about your boobs.”

You will definitely laugh; you will probably learn; you might get angry. The scope is huge. It’s about, like, EVERYTHING.

And it just gets better. Go read it, unless you are sicker of me than I am of myself. Pat came to the reading with his sons, Adam and Joe, and like Austin, they’re all grows up! (This has been a distinct theme of the trip so far — people keep coming to my readings accompanied by tweens, teenagers, and college students whom I remember as babies.)

Of the rest of the people at the reading was a friend with whom I once sang a duet in a high school musical; another was Helen Johnson, who I profiled in 1996, and remains such a dear friend, though we don’t hear from one another as much as we mean to. The endlessly smart and entertaining Spike Gillespie was there, which is all the approval I’ll ever need. I had a happy time doing the reading, and signed as much stock as I could.

I got to have dinner with Michelle Breyer, my Austin touchstone, now the super successful goddess of coiled locks at naturallycurly.com; Michelle is yet another person blissfully aglow with newspaperdom’s afterlife. I got to see Marques Harper and his friends at a bar on 4th Street (eek — flashbacks to Oilcan Harry’s, etc.) on Friday night, at which Marques reminded me just how bad the gay dating scene can be in this otherwise enlightened town. I got to have breakfast with Pat Beach at a relocated El Sol y La Luna.

I got to spend a few hours Sunday with Spike, who showed me quilts at the history museum, bought me lunch at Kerbey Lane and then showed me what became of the old Mueller Airport land. (The abandoned control tower is still standing, amid a cookie-cutter subdivision, and it is a wondrously spooky sight. I wonder if they still affix a NOEL sign to it during holidays? Doesn’t look like they do.)

Also? I got to drive around a lot Austin, by myself, which I hadn’t done in, gosh, 10 years. This got me in one of my moods — not sad or anything, just reflective. (Self-reflective, of course.)

What was I here?

All I could think of was how much I worked. I kept wondering about the stories: Is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s stuff still in that storage unit on South Congress, and does the check still arrive each month to cover the rent? What happened to John Guerin after he sold his Guitar Heaven store in Georgetown, and did Denny keep the oft-traded Fender acoustic forever, like he said he would? Is the roller rink off 183 and Burnet still open and do they still do adult-only skate on Tuesdays? How are the Worthingtons, the northwest Austin suburbanites I profiled? Do the old men still meet every morning in the Lockhart Dairy Queen? Is that used office equipment still in the Quonset hut east of I-35, and if so, what did it look like during this Great Recession? How’s the funeral business treating Robert Falcon these days?

I don’t actually need answers to all those questions. (And, in a happy coincidence, Lupe and Sonny Falcon saw the Statesman article, called me at the front desk at Book People, and I went over and saw them on Sunday afternoon. If you’ve read “All Faiths” in Off Ramp, the story about the discount funeral home I wrote in 1999, you know who I’m talking about. The actual All Faiths strip-mall funeral home is still on South Congress and St. Elmo, but Robert left it behind years ago and moved on; he’s now running two funeral homes in Amarillo.)

So there’s that kind of nostalgia. But also I was thinking about my former world here. I had great friends back then (many now moved away), but I was also terribly lonely sometimes. I spent a crazy amount of time reading. On Saturday morning, I walked into the Little City cafe on Congress (shabby now) just to look around for a minute recall that young(er) man who spent so much time sitting there, deep into his books and magazines, or marking up his own story drafts with a red pen. (When I was feeling flush with cash, which was maybe once every six weeks, I would shift the locale to the bar at the Four Seasons.) You could not have convinced that Hank Stuever that he’d be back in Book People reading from his own book in 10 years.

Austin is like some kind of fever dream I once had. In 1996 and ’97, I got so down that I had to see a therapist, who had me try a variety of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, but I don’t think I was on them long enough to tell the difference, and pretty soon it was the work (and people) who lifted me out of that dark funk. What I did love was Ambien (I took one Ambien a night for almost three years — nearly my entire Austin tenure) and I wonder if this is why Austin has such a dreamy, gauzy quality in my mind.

That story Pat Beach wrote really touched me. He was under no obligation whatsoever to do such a thing, or do it with the care and thought that he did. Over breakfast Sunday morning, Pat and I caught up. When we sat two cubicles apart in the Statesman‘s features department, we used to really pay attention to what the other was working on. All of us feature writers did — we had good editors and the gang of us (Kallenberg, McLeese, Garcia, Corky, Hibberd, Barnes, others) were in the same essential hunt. It was collegial and competitive; our bosses wanted it that way. We cared about that most ephemeral thing: writing feature stories.

Now here’s Pat and me talking about it over huevos and tacos like prematurely old men. I so admire Pat for sticking with it — and sticking with it in Austin, when he could have moved to a lot of other papers, when things were still ripping along. Here, in 2009, he’s one of two (two!) full-time feature section writers who have a general assignment beat. I want him to keep hitting it hard.

It’s Monday morning now. I’m packed, checked out of the hotel, and having breakfast at Magnolia Cafe and reading the Statesman, which, I have to say, given the givens, looks and reads like a paper in relatively sturdy shape. I’m still worried about the fate of feature writing, not just here but everywhere, but a piece on the Statesman’s front page Sunday by Kevin Robbins, about one of the survivors of the Aggie bonfire collapse (there’s that 10-years-ago thing, again) made me think all this fretting is hooey. It’s good.

Gregory Kallenberg, if you were here with me at Magnolia, there’d be extra jalepenos in a little plastic cup, and yes, we could do an entree split.

I’m off to Houston for a reading at Brazos Books tonight. The fact that my rental car (a black Ford Escape; apologies to polar ice caps) has an iPod jack only sweetens the deal. Yes, I went to Waterloo Records, but once again the Internet ruins everything it touches: Instead of buying a heap of CDs and a couple of LPs, I simply wandered the store for an hour and made mental notes about what to go get from iTunes.

Drove down from Fort Worth to Austin today. Last night’s reading in Fort Worth was small — 14 people plus your author — but actually calming, fun. I had people sit in a circle in the TCU Barnes & Noble cafe. I donned the Burger King Wise Man crown (hey, Laura T. Faherty: It travels well! Excellent work on the gold adornment!) and read some, and talked some, and then the group asked questions, and then the intercom voice of God said: Attention Barnes & Noble customers, we will be closing in 5 minutes. Which means: mighty fine time for a beer next door. Got to see an old friend, Jennifer LaBoon (nee Dasovich) — we go back to Oklahoma City high school days and St. Charles youth group. Also met Jeni’s (I still call her that) husband, Stephen, and adorable son, Will. And Jessie Milligan and some of her friends from the Star-Telegram, or who used to work there. And really? It seems like I spent the entire evening eating piles and piles of tortilla chips, with so much salsa that it was brought to the table in Mason jars. This is something Texas and I do very well together.

Jessie put me up for the night and fed me a splendid breakfast — more fresh fruit than I’ve had in a week. Vitamins canceling out corn chips as we speak. Jessie is so great — so wise and full of spirit and now aglow with a peaceful vibe I’ve recognized in others: She took a buyout from her newspaper job last year and has MOVED ON. I loved seeing some of her artwork, hearing about her masters’ work in library science, and staying in her lovely house with loyal ol’ Andy, her dog. In the middle of the night, there was a terrific thunderstorm — loud enough to wake me and it was just scary enough to enthrall. As for peaceful slumber, Jessie’s couch gets an A-plus.

I’m in Austin tonight — about to go wander around and invariably do more damage to my cholesterol count. Everybody had prepped me for the big changes, at least skyline-wise, that Austin has seen recently. I was ready for that, but it was the urban infill that really shocked me, too — all my beloved frontage roads north of town are maxed out with tributes to the dream of capitalism — I mean, PROGRESS. I’ll write more about Austin after the weekend is over. I’m here til Monday morning.

Speaking of life in Austin, here’s that review from the December issue of Texas Monthly by Mike Shea that I mentioned earlier this week.

If you’re actually in Austin, please come to the Book People reading Saturday at 3 p.m. I’ll be grateful to see those chairs not-so-empty.

About 50 or 60 (?) people came to the Tinsel reading at Frisco’s Stonebriar Centre Tuesday night. For those who expected fireworks (or a Hank Stuever effigy burning!) I am so sorry to disappoint: The crowd was very interested in the book and gave me a very warm reception. (Um, it helps that the audience included a surprise: my mother the nun, Sister Joann Stuever.) I think people in Frisco who hate the book (whether they’ve read it or not; and you know who you are) are doing the exact right thing: Ignoring it, mainly. That’s straight off of page 5 or 6 in PR for Dummies. It’s also the cruelest thing you can do to an egomaniac author! So nice work, city of Frisco.

UPDATE 11/22: I missed this – Morning News reporter Jessica Meyers’ take on the reading.

Tyra Damm, a columnist for The Briefing, met me in the Barnes & Noble cafe beforehand for an interview. I only just met her, but I like Tyra. Unlike many Frisco relo residents, she pays close attention to local goings-on and how disconnected life there can feel, if you let it, but she’s also committed to the place and its people, and writes about them. She’s conflicted about the book — is it a slam or a tender portrait of Frisco? Is Frisco unique or is it the fullest expression of consumer-culture America? To all that, I have always said, and still say: both.

Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski came to the reading along with their posse: Verna Iraggi (Bridgette’s mom, always so sweet), plus her sister-in-law, Cheryl Iraggi, and nephew, Brayden, who has more than doubled in age and size since I first started the book. Plus Greg Trykoski and Christine Meeuwsen, who always makes me smile. And Caroll Cavazos came with her family (Michelle, Joey, little Lincoln) and Marissa — who was 10 years old at the start of Tinsel and now a beautiful teenager, looking quite cool!

And Tammie Parnell? Alas, a no-show — both nights. But do pick up the December issue of D for a fabulous portrait of her that’s running with the Tinsel excerpt. It’s out now!

I skipped the reading part of the Frisco event and went straight to Q&A, of which people had many questions to ask. I gave the mic to Jeff so he could answer the question everyone wants to know: What did the people in the book think of the book when they read it?

The answer to that is hot and cold. Truly, there’s one or more things in the book that each of the characters wishes I hadn’t put in there. But Jeff said he and Bridgette liked the book and found it to be very true, accurate; would he have done it differently, and included other things and left out others? Absolutely.

I’m asked about this a lot. It’s the most fascinating, Janet Malcom-y part of the process. But I’m trying very hard to no longer represent or speak for the characters’ feelings or words. It is up to them to tell the world how they feel about Tinsel. It’s their story as much as it is mine, but the book is my version of it.

Now a stranger thing is happening to us: We’re saying goodbye. Caroll really wanted to meet Tammie (she loved reading about her) and I hope they do meet someday. Jeff and Bridgette got to meet Caroll. One thing about both readings — and the last three days, as I ran between interviews and reading events — was that I didn’t have nearly the time to visit with any of them, something we’d grown so accustomed to over the last three years. They’re not used to me being too busy for them, and also that I no longer take notes on them. Now what? Now we remain friends and check in, the way people stay on one another’s Christmas card lists.

The best part of the Stonebriar reading was meeting new fans of the book. I was very cheered to meet two Frisco school librarians who loved the book and have been encouraging others to read it and think about it. I met the “Tinselectomy” group from Preston Trail Community Church, who are using the book to encourage people to scale back on the shopping and focus on Christmas’s essential message of spirit and people. They brought a camera crew!

And my favorite readers so far are a group of high school seniors in Frisco who read the Dallas Morning News article about me in their AP English class and decided that finally– FINALLY — someone had come to Frisco and sees it as they do. (There was apparently a raging debate in the class about me, the book –”how dare this outsider come here and make fun of our town” etc.)

No one at the reading seemed at all confrontational. THAT sort of thing they save for e-mail, some of which would curl your hair. Maybe someday I’ll share it. (News flash, according to one e-mailer yesterday morning: I am nothing but a “self-satisfied faggot” — yow! — who should put my book where the sun don’t shine. Um, sir or ma’am? Do you mean all the copies of my book or just one? They make much less ideal Christmas presents after that happens.)

Wednesday, I had breakfast at Cindi’s with my Uncle Louis and John in our customary way, with my mother, who seems to be doing quite well. I’ll see more of her in Oklahoma City on Nov. 30/Dec. 1 — she’s coming to that reading, too, from Wichita. (Groupie!)

I went to Stonebriar Centre (one last time?) Wednesday afternoon to catch up on some work and answer all sorts of e-mails. (Being on tour is mostly about answering e-mails and voice mails.) I ate at the California Pizza Kitchen and got a Chinese chair massage (my last?). In the food court, while I bought my Route 44 diet cherry limeade at the Sonic, I saw Santa Claus sitting there by himself, eating a Charlie’s sub. This is the “new” Santa, who replaced the Santa everyone loved. There are a lot of reasons not to like this new Santa (customers say he’s grumpy, has a weird hairdo, etc.) but I think his biggest mistake is sitting in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING FOOD COURT eating lunch like he works at a cell-phone kiosk or something. Dude, respect the fourth wall, y’ know? Of course, it’s exactly the sort of thing I would have put in Tinsel. I thought about joining him, but guess what — I don’t care anymore.

That’s a strange feeling.

Wednesday night at Legacy Books in Plano was everything an author could want: Amazing bookstore with a friendly staff, big crowd, and big sales. I read from some of my favorite parts of the book and people laughed and listened and then asked very good questions. I signed books for almost an hour.

But I am just a gnat on a buffalo compared to what’s about to happen at that store: Sarah Palin will be there on Dec. 4. They hope to get her to sign 1,000 books in 180 minutes. People won’t be allowed to ask her questions and they’ll be lucky if she has a second to make eye contact with each customer. Nevertheless, tickets are sold out! Gaaaaa! Do you know what it would mean to me to sell 1,000 books in a day? I offered to sign some of her stock. She can write “Sarah Palin” above the place where I would have already written “…says ‘buy Hank Stuever’s TINSEL today!!’” No dice.

The evening ended with a lovely little cocktail party at Karen and Larry Flannery’s house in Plano — parents of my dear friend and now master macaron-maker, Tim Flannery. After a few sips of Prosecco, I finally felt myself unwind after a solid week of OVERSTIMULATION and a sinful amount of thinking and talking about me, me, me, and going fast, fast, fast. Leave it to the Flannery family to relax me. I got back to the Hilton Garden Inn (my last Frisco hotel room? Ever?) and slept like a baby, at long last. Until, of course, 6:40 a.m., when Lanigan and Malone in the Morning called, right on schedule. (Good morning, Cleveland!)

I checked out of the hotel. I deliberately did not drive past Stonebriar Centre. For all I know, I could be back here in a few days, but I don’t think so. I will come back — to see the families, to shop. But I don’t know when.

Driving to Fort Worth, was reminded of that wise sage, Foghorn Leghorn, who once said: “That gal–I say, that gal reminds me of the road between Dallas and Fort Worth. No curves.”

But there are curves, along 121. And tolls — Dollar Rent-a-Car is probably going to have my ass on a plate for driving on a toll-tag-only route. Hank Stuever burns in effigy after all!

Tonight: TCU Barnes & Noble at 7 p.m. Reuniting with some old friends. Tomorrow: Austin bound! I’m having a great time. My book is doomed, but it’s out there and I like telling people about it.

Stonebriar Centre Barnes & Noble tonight. Where it all began. I hope people bring lots of questions. Here’s a picture of me in the Stonebriar food court in October, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News article.

Here’s a li’l roundup of some press in the last week or so for Tinsel, while I have a minute and my morning Diet Pepsi…

There was a review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on Sunday. Was it a flat review? A good one? The writer is the very picture of restraint!

Chris Carbone had some trenchant thoughts at the Faster Times:

What is the meaning in all of this? Tinsel asks more questions that it answers. Clear-eyed and funny, Stuever paints our country’s famed conspicuous consumption in its gory detail, leaving the ultimate judgements—Is it morally right? Can it be sustained? Do these questions really matter?—to the reader.

I got off the plane at D/FW yesterday and had a look at the new December issue of Texas Monthly and was pleased to find a nice, tight review by Mike Shea there — so I bought two copies! And if you want to read it, you’ll have to buy one or wait. It’s not online yet. Which is what I call a business model!

Also, Robert Philpot at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote an article about the book last week. I thought his questions were quite good and so was the piece. It’s very strange (duh) to be the subject instead of the writer. That’s why I doubly enjoy reading a story about Tinsel that is tight and exactly right and adds some ideas of its own. I enjoyed getting to meet Robert, at least by phone, and hope I meet him in person Thursday in Fort Worth.

Thoroughly unimpressed by Tinsel, the Dallas Observer has thrown their two copies of the book to the wolves who read the Un-Fair Park blog. (CORRECTION: Read comment below. Observer actually IMpressed — they just got overwhelmed by all the copies that got sent to them in the PR deluge. I need to get thicker skin when I read blogs! But who doesn’t?)

And the DMN continues to let people know about the book. I’m making a visit to their newsroom tomorrow (Wednesday) for a verrrry informal … I don’t know what to call it — workshop? Q&A? Something. I was invited by an editor there to come in and talk about the making of the book and feature writing at newspapers and whatever else is on our minds.

I’m getting my brain ready to do an hour on Think, the midday show on KERA, Dallas’s NPR station this afternoon. I’ll file a dispatch in the next day or two about how the Frisco, Plano and Fort Worth readings go down. I have a new respect for people who can blog on the go, go, go — with links and everything. And we do this … why?

The Politics & Prose reading Sunday night was a lot of fun (or, I hope it was). Yes, that’s me, dancing around, dressing up as a school pageant Wise Man in a velour bathrobe and a Burger King crown.

So great to see many friends in the audience, and the full complement of Stuever siblings: Pat, Ann and Mary, and assorted other fam. (And it’s not even for a funeral!) Plus Loyola friends, New York friends. Sold lots of books, and did not feel completely embarrassed. (The threshold for that is presently very low.) Enjoy this video clip, courtesy of Michael’s smart new iPod nano…

I got up at the butt-crack of dawn today to fly to Texas. It’s good to be back — getting ready for tomorrow night at Stonebriar Centre’s Barnes & Noble. They’re in luck: I didn’t bring the bathrobe or the music. But I did bring the crown, just in case.