On local public radio this morning (I was listening on headphones at the gym), literature professor Hugh Witemeyer talking about why D.H. Lawrence, a Brit, kept returning to northern New Mexico during his itiinerant life. Lawrence, Witemeyer said, was drawn to the "wild and improvised life of the American West". Even when you scrape away years of encrustations of Western mythos, there's something to that.

Witemeyer also said Lawrence loved to make his own furniture.