Borges in Austin
I’ve lived in Austin for almost nine years: four as an undergraduate and then, after a stint in Houston, four and a half more while I’ve worked on my PhD. … Continue reading
How Austin Became Weird: The Story of a Slogan
Everyday, thousands of Austinites roam our city’s sidewalk-less streets, creep along its concrete highways, and ramble through the corridors of its universities and start-ups with one question burning in their … Continue reading
Austin Old-Timer and Newcomer
I. Austin is the capital of the American Renaissance of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The explosive construction of bridges, ramps, roads, buildings; the flow of creative, inventive, and … Continue reading
Creative Class Blues
if creativity is the ultimate virtue, then why did god create the earth only to drown it in a flood? I ask as a creator who traffics not in planets but in … Continue reading
Austin: One Thousand Songs
AUSTIN When the fuck did I move to this town? I have literally no idea – this dawn, my brain stopped synapses, stripped me senseless. I recall only the … Continue reading
Noteworthy
A fellow graduate student recently found a handwritten note on her car, which has a California license plate and was parked in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood. It reads (spelling errors … Continue reading
Shorts from Yoke-Sum Wong
I’ve seen the neighborhood changed rapidly in eight months. At least six giant houses have come up, empty lots ripped up, earth moved, trees chain-sawed, streets punched and smashed while … Continue reading
Grackles and Old Cars
Grackles are sleek birds that wear the expression of rapacious fishes. Many years of cohabitation with humans has not loosened the danger on which they seem to insist. Perhaps it … Continue reading
North Lamar Bus and other Austin poems
Local writer Monty Jones has shared four new poems with TEOA, including one that that sums up the Austin mindset quite nicely: “When I moved here, people told me I was … Continue reading
Austin/Life
‘Room 4.202, Garrison Hall, 12am’ flows like blue wispy clouds against a bright morning sun, across the crumpled post-it note that throbs proudly, full of opportunity and hope, in the … Continue reading
Sing the City of the Rounded Shoulders
For Carl Sandburg and Nelson Algren. O sing this city! a land of unstoppable drive to the self-satisfied middle where it stops to spare its energy for another corporate happy … Continue reading
Austin is a Graffiti Wall
The aerosol boom of the 1980s gave rise to a new wave of street artists who commandeered the popular image of graffiti as an illicit and subversive medium and breathed … Continue reading
Letter to the Sultan of Brunei
One thing is for certain in the hearts and minds of our little “weird” city, and that is coming to the defense of our sacred landscape! Granted, not everyone “gets” … Continue reading
Spirits of the Weird
Clean and sober and 66. That’s Eddy Franklin today. He was out of the office for a short errand, heading back to his state job as a paperwork wrangler. He … Continue reading
Sweaty Gnarled Clumps of Limbs and Torsos
Your walk should be a brief sojourn: Red River to Congress. Ten minutes, tops. But throngs of revelers block your route like a blood clot. Faces and bodies blur into … Continue reading
The Mapmaker
Nobody was forced to stay in their neighborhoods. There was no police action or citywide internment. We all just started settling in by our own accord and didn’t notice how … Continue reading
Morning Assembly
Morning assembly at my daughter’s elementary school was once a ditty of tattooed legs and necklines, skateboards, scooters, tousled hair, everyone holding hands as bodies converged on the cafeteria from a … Continue reading
This Motherfucker Ain’t Got No Teeth
As a gay man re-locating to Austin, TX, Dominique experiences hope and destruction through his efforts to utilize geo-social media applications to make new friends, find lovers, and start dating … Continue reading
The End of Austin 