Last Week in Dallas: Some Writers and Some Art

Last week, I got to spend two evenings in the presence of great artists and one afternoon touring the art at AT&T (aka incorrectly called “Cowboys”) Stadium.On Tuesday night, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) featured two distinguished writers for their Arts and Letters Live series—novelist Joyce Carol Oates and two-term Poet Laureate of the USA, Natasha Trethewey. Providing them with witty introductions that came with shameless plugs for The Southwest Review was Dr. Willard Spiegelman, the SMU professor who, for years, has edited it. Lest the audience didn’t know (I confess I didn’t) he informed everyone that The Southwest Review is the third-longest-running literary review in the US.Tretheway did a masterful job with an original poem commissioned by the DMA, something inspired by her work of choice from the museum’s collection. Later, she read a poem in which she told of twice visiting Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson—once as a girl and later as an adult. The first time, everyone acted as if slavery were some normal thing everyone did without realizing it was wrong (never mind that John Adams opposed the practice along with many others Jefferson knew well). By the time of the poet’s second visit to the great Palladian-esque plantation, everyone knew Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of the third president’s slaves, so the guides mentioned it as if were some normal thing. I had a similarly shocking set of visits to Monticello, so her description left me gripping my chair.Oates read from her most recent work, a memoir titled The Lost Landscape. My favorite of her selections was from her chapter titled “Happy Chicken 1942–1944,” narrated by the Oates family’s Rhode Island Red, a fun point-of-view choice that, oddly, worked. Happy Chicken enjoyed an esteemed position as the JCO's pet—until he went away (we all know where). Another chapter left us all cracking up as she describe all the jobs she held as a kid—including fake-gem-jewelry-involving-glue that only her family members bought (we all know why).After the readings, the audience had a chance to ask a few questions. During this time Tretheway said how The Diary of Anne Frank had affected her and Oates said how Alice in Wonderland had influenced her. Tretheway told how memorizing the Gettysburg Address—the first thing she learned by heart—made her realize that what we write can also be “in the service of truth and justice and righteousness.” Oates told of memorizing Bible verses to get to go to camp, which she said turned out to be somewhat of a punishment. (It was the last time she had any interest in the Bible.)Tretheway also said she agreed with the observation that the impulse to write often comes from a sense of being an outsider or an observer. Eudora Welty, she reminded us, learned dialogue by sitting under the piano and listening to living-room conversations.On Thursday night, some members of my department and a couple of students gathered at a restaurant in the newly developed Trinity Groves area to share a meal with Jeremy Begbie from Duke Divinity, whose forte is theology and the arts. I could hardly wait to pick his brain. But sadly, my GPS failed to figure out the “newly developed” part of the location, and I arrived 45 minutes late after circling around Dallas, hopelessly lost in rush hour. Once I had a seat, the noise drowned out all but what people said directly to me.An inch of redemption came when I drove to AT&T Stadium the next afternoon for a private tour of its art: I perfectly handled two turns that would have otherwise left me lost on some of the same streets with whom I'd become BFFs the previous night.My friend Amanda, who used to be my guide in Manhattan, has relocated to Dallas and works as an event planner at the stadium. As it turns out, Mrs. Jones, the missus of the owner of the place, has decent taste. She insists they keep the stadium spotless (even the floors and escalator grips) and that they maintain an art collection worth seeing. Amanda's secret to getting the most out of it: everywhere you go, look up.Of course we took the obligatory selfie on the 50-year-line. But even more fun was that Amanda took me to some normally off-limits locker rooms. Guests can take guided or self-guided tours of the art. And of course there’s the gift shop at the end. And let me tell ya, that thing is totally a cultural experience of a different kind.