John Nova Lomax

Years ago, I was a fan of a now defunct Houston blog called Swamplot. It dealt with Houston as a place and had lots of real estate news, but also made a point of linking to anything interesting about Houston. The Great God Pan is Dead got a few links from Swamplot over the years.

Swamplot also would link to an occasional Houston Press column called Sole of Houston, written by John Nova Lomax and David Beebe. The pair would take epic walks along long Houston roads: Westhiemer, Richmond, Long Point / Washington Ave., Shepherd, Bissonnet, Telephone Road, Clinton Drive, Harrisburg, Airline Drive, and Bellaire Blvd.  Lomax wrote the accounts; Beebe was his wingman, essentially. By walking these roads, they inevitably saw much more than drivers ever could. They were eye-opening accounts. I wish I could link to them, but Houston Press’s website doesn’t seem to have them stored anywhere accessible. (The Houston Press ceased its paper publication in 2017.) Lomax wrote a short recap of those walks in Houstonia, but the original pieces were epic. I wish they had been published as a book.

The reason I’m writing about Lomax is that he is dying. I had heard that he was sick, mostly from his own Facebook reports. I just heard the bad news through a Twitter update from Sara Cress. On his GoFundMe page, his father wrote the following within the last day:

John Nova is in his last days with liver and kidney failure, an infection, bleeding ulcers and lesser issues, all of which came to a head today (Monday 5.8). He is being kept alive by meds and machines and now has the decision as to when to cut them off. The doctors have done all they can do and he will now be getting hospice care in the ICU as there is no point in moving him. St. Luke's staff has tried everything medically possible but too many things have gone wrong to bring him back. He will make the decision about when to ask them to turn off the machines and stop the meds that are keeping him alive now. This is so very, very sad and I thank all of you who have worked with us to provide funds for his recovery. We are making plans for a book of his writing and a Celebration of his Life down the trail. We are planning to distribute any remaining funds after funeral expenses and medical bills to his children, John Henry and Harriet Rose.

Lomax is the scion of the legendary folk music family. His great grandfather was John Avery Lomax and grandfather was Alan Lomax, I think. (They might be great uncles—I apologize if I’m getting this wrong). Lomax came from a musical family—he often wrote about his childhood encounters with family friend Townes Van Zandt, including an autobiographical story he wrote for me which I published in Exu, which was titled “Smear the Queer.” Perhaps his most moving piece of writing was his article about his mother, Julia Taylor. She had been a drug addict who died when hit by a car after living on the street for a few years. The piece, “Of Unknown Origin,” is a tough read, and must have been painful to write. According to Lomax’s father, Lomax was in the hospital for alcohol-related problems. Addiction seems to run in the family.