Hardly TRP at all, yet............

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

As someone who has spent three months in Ohio, I can't understand this
vitriol either. When it comes to fiction, however, there does seem to be
a tradition of portraying Ohio.

"The zone sometimes appears where we least expect it. In Ohio, for
instance. In the literary imagination and the popular imagination alike,
Ohio has long maintained, as they say, a low profile. Its image is one
of colorlessness and poverty of associations. It is middle-American in
every sense: middling in its landscapes and natural phenomena, culturally
middling, sociologically middling - not, one would think, likely raw
material for ontological improvisation. Yet, as we have seen, a number of
postmodernist writers have chosen to improvise on the theme of Ohio:
Patchen in The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Barthelme in Up, Aloft in
the Air, Davenport in The Invention of Photography in Toledo. The zone
of Ohio, it would appear, is a recurrent feature of postmodernist writing,
a topos in both senses, geographical as well as rhetorical. --- [I]n
order to understand why Ohio, of all places, belongs to the postmodernist
repertoire, we need to take into account the semiotics of American space
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), p. 49.

This was, of course, before AtD, yet after VL, where DL tries to hide in
the middle-American town of Columbus, OH, in the guise of a moderate clerk.

[Cf. Sherwood Anderson et al...]


Heikki

On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, rich wrote:

> I think the sentiments are fairly parallel. not sure where all this vitriol
> about Ohio comes from. i think it's dumb
>
> rich
>
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 10:23 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think this thread has been about Columbus, OH, not the Spanish explorer.
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> i find all this columbus hating rather tiresome. as if native peoples
> >> were living in harmony and not murdering each other, too. read fathers &
> >> crows. it's standard reductions of a complicated world into an easily
> >> identifiable good guy-bad guy history which I find moronic. i dont condone
> >> wounded knee or cortez or like injustices but surely we can be a bit more
> >> discerning than chorusing cortez the killer.
> >>
> >> rich
> >>
> >> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Yeah it started with Columbus and spread from the asshole of Ohio out.
> >>>
> >>> Sent from my iPad
> >>>
> >>> On Nov 5, 2012, at 5:27 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> amen to that...
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:13 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> there's enough mediocrity to go around no matter where you are
> >>>>
> >>>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> Kirn is a novelist, as you may know, covering this election as a
> >>>>> writer not like a journalist. I am not sending this to
> >>>>> start plist conversations on the election or OHIO, yet I bet, in the
> >>>>> way we do, it might and they will be better than some journalists'.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I am sending it because the very novelistic judgment of "mediocrity"
> >>>>> reminds me like a knocking stick of TRP's take on OHIO, via
> >>>>> the Swiftian savaging of Columbus in that greater and greater book:
> >>>>> Against the Day. And, of course, Columbus has naming resonance
> >>>>> with the promise of America. Goodbye,Columbus (but I hope you come
> >>>>> through for this election. Again.)
> >>>>> **
> >>>>> *The New Republic (@tnr <https://twitter.com/tnr>)*
> >>>>> 11/5/12, 8:00 AM <https://twitter.com/tnr/status/265438354118684672>
> >>>>> . at walterkirn <https://twitter.com/@walterkirn> says the fact that
> >>>>> #Ohio <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#Ohio>, the cradle of U.S.
> >>>>> mediocrity, gets to pick the president is terrifying bit.ly/SsPXxC<http://t.co/N7ZouPUm>
> >>>>> **Download the official Twitter app here<https://twitter.com/download>
> >>>>> ****Sent from my iPad
> >>>>> ****
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> www.innergroovemusic.com
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
>