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Poems from sonnets to free verse focus on pleasures and problems in ranch life and in west Texas, which include variations differing for generations returning to the ranch, and those family members who leave the ranch for city life. CORMORANTS’ JOURNEY Snowbirds come diving down, sliding in carelessly splatting, pecking on windows, doors, building nests, dropping threads, shards of old nests hanging on their beaks, claws. Their fluttering white feathers blocking the sun’s puny attempts to break through, making the streets slick with their droppings as their baggage slides by, bumping into place side by side by side. Odysseus would tramp off to far west Texas, hankering for firm enchiladas, crusty tacos, brown eyes, and thin clear skies.

Literature is not for clear answers. Literature is for complicated questions. There is vital empirical data in literary texts—not data about economic fact, though there is some of that as well, but data about how people felt and thought and wrote about economic and market issues. If we care about that, if that is as important as Deirdre McCloskey has argued, we have a responsibility to find that data, to write about it, to share it, and to teach it (Skwire in Cato Unbound, 2012. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/07/02/sarah-skwire/bonfirecliches).

No man more singularly embodied the American oil industry and its far-flung development in the first half of the twentieth century than DeGolyer. As a geologist--the most eminent of his day--entrepreneur, innovator, and scholar, he had touched almost every aspect of significance in the industry. Among dozens of other interests, Everette DeGolyer had two great passions in his life that drove most of his waking hours: oil and books. His reputation as a petroleum geologist began early when as a young man he discovered the vastly productive Portrero del Llano oil field in Mexico in 1910. This discovery established both his personal fortune and his esteemed place in the oil business: first in the British-owned Mexican Eagle Oil Company, then as president of Amerada Corporation, and finally as a partner in a Dallas petroleum consulting firm that he cofounded with Lewis MacNaughton in 1936. Here, Merrill talks about DeGolyer, a real oilman, as opposed to a celluloid fiction--one who, at the surface, seems to represent the very antithesis of JR Ewing.

According to Ramirez, the Mexican government has romanticized the internal workings of the country in an effort to mask the inequalities of elite land ownership under the system of caciquismo. [...]Julio Ortega suggests that Cómalas residents only understand life once they die (qtd. in Campbell 340). [...]the dead townspeople pay for their attachment to the land as well as their inability to reflect when alive because their memories of happiness and prosperity now cannot be disengaged from the cacique's exploitation of them in life. According to Owens, Americans perceive Mexico as a destitute landscape filled with desperate people. In colonial texts, however, Mexico appears as a \"meeting place of the Old World and New World\" (Alarcon 143), a place that \"transcends reality\" (159). Because of the ambiguous nature of Mexico's identity evidenced in the conflicting descriptions of the country, Cole begins to long for the vision of Mexico that best represents his desires: the Mexico that will transcend his current technologically cluttered reality.

A short story is presented.

A short story is presented.

A short story is presented.